Design of a FHIR interface for wearable healthcare devices

Abstract

This paper designs a FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources) interface to provide a standard clinical data exchange for personal wearable healthcare devices, aiming at taking them as a part of remote medical services. In uploading, the agent converts the series of sensor readings, such as electrocardiogram, to the JSON-based standard format, divides it into several subparts if necessary, finds the references to relevant resources, and submits the request via RESTful API. For download, a Python client specifies the set of search parameters, gets the target resources from the server, converts them to the language-specific data structure, and hands over to the analysis module. Our testbed is implemented, making use of diverse FHIR tools including the FRED resource editor and the HAPI server.