A WoT approach to eHealth: case study of a hospital laboratory alert escalation system

With the generalization of network-enabled devices such as smart phones, slate computers and tablets, new challenges await the eHealth research community. Indeed, these devices should not only integrate seamlessly into the daily workflow, but their usage must appear as ordinary as possible to the different caregivers. Using RESTful architectures, it is possible to model custom objects in the health domain as resources, interact with them and combine them to mashup applications, enhancing and facilitating in a natural way the work of caregivers. We claim that embedding eHealth workflows into the Web of Things is not only possible, but even enhances the whole process. An alert is no more an isolated event, but becomes connected to other resources providing additional information about its general context. In this paper, we illustrate some of the challenges of bringing REST to the eHealth domain by studying an existing hospital laboratory alerts system and by proposing to generalize it in order to encompass the whole escalating process and exchanges of information among caregivers, patients and their medical records.