W2E #x2014; Wellness Warehouse Engine for semantic interoperability of consumer health data

摘要

Novel health monitoring devices and applications allow consumers easy and ubiquitous ways to monitor their health status. However, technologies from different providers lack both technical and semantic interoperability and hence the resulting health data is often deeply tied to specific service, which is limiting its re-usability and utilization in different services. We have designed a Wellness Warehouse Engine (W2E) that bridges this gap and enables seamless exchange of data between different services. W2E provides interfaces to various data sources and makes data available via unified REST API to other services. Importantly, it includes Unifier — an engine that allows transforming input data into generic units reusable by other services, and Analyzer — an engine that allows advanced analysis of input data, such as combining different data sources into new output parameters. In this paper, we describe the architecture of W2E and demonstrate its applicability by using it for uniting data from several consumer activity trackers. Finally, we discuss challenges of building Unifier and Analyzer engines for ever-enlarging number of new devices.