A web of thing middleware for enabling standard web access over BLE based healthcare wearable device

An internet of things (IoT) based smart healthcare system may consists of various wearable devices connected through a wireless body area network (WBAN) communication protocol. In one side, the heterogeneity of those connected devices open up a wide opportunity to develop various applications from personal health assistance to massive national healthcare planning. However, in another side, it poses an interoperability challenge since each publishing device may have different message format and communication mechanism. Considering that challenge, the web platform can be seen as promising candidate for providing an interoperability layer as we can abstract various devices as single representation i.e. web resource. In this paper, we propose the design of middleware for enabling efficient web of things access over healthcare wearable devices. The proposed middleware consists of three components: gateway-to-cloud device, messaging service and data access interface. The gateway device has an important role to collect the sensor data perceived by various wearable sensing device through a bluetooth low energy (BLE) protocol. The collected data are then relayed to the a cloud data center using lightweight MQTT messaging protocol. In order to provide an access to the stored data, the system offers two kind of interfaces: the Restful HTTP for non-real time access and MQTT websocket interface to accommodate access on sensing data in real time manner.