Data Sources and Gateways: Design and Open Specification

Introduction: With With the proliferation of available ICT services, several sensors and health applications have become ubiquitous, while many applications have been developed to detect certain health conditions and early signs of disease. Currently, all these services operate independently, and the available data is heterogeneous with limited value gained from its exploitation. Aim: The Data Sources and Gateways component aims at providing an abstracted and unified API to support the data accumulation from various sources including healthcare organisations, biosensors, laboratories and mobile applications. Meanwhile it tackles connectivity and communication issues with such information sources. Methods: The CrowdHEALTH Data Sources and Gateways Service incorporates four main services: The Configuration Service, The DB Connection Handling Service, The File Parsing Service and The RESTful Client Service. Results: The initial version of the component design has built upon the requirements collected from the use case participants acting also as data providers. Conclusion: These four services presented in this paper guide the implementation of the first version of the Data Sources and Gateways component software prototype. The Data Sources and Gateways component remains to be evaluated within the context of the project and be enriched in order to meet additional end user needs.