Health-IoT: Requirements for a Healthy Ecosystem

There is an increasing convergence of IoT features in newly developed health devices, bringing with it both optimism and concern. While these devices have similar connectivity goals to other IoT devices, they do bring critical requirements inherent in the digital health domain. This includes safety, privacy, reliability, accuracy and most importantly user assurance and engagement. These requirements are not usually met in generalized IoT platforms and architectures. In this paper, we take a step back to analyze the additional requirements and constraints that must be met by these devices to form an acceptable and effective health IoT ecosystem. We present democratization, a requirement that helps consolidate the many companion apps and data cloud logins a user must manage on a daily basis. The safe and proper use of devices is also a key requirement to ensure accurate data, not noise, are provided by these devices, boosting confidence. Ensuring verified user identity and enabling meaningful and safe interactions between the user's various devices (referred to as IoTility) are also key requirements that we analyze in detail.