An IoT-based mobile gateway for intelligent personal assistants on mobile health environments

The evolution of mobile devices has triggered the appearance of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs). IPAs are software agents used to support users to fulfill several daily actions. They are supposed to be intelligent in such a way that allows them to give their owners advices about many different subjects. To do so, IPAs must learn about their user behavior and routines. With the current state of the art technologies, scenarios of ubiquitous communication can be created. One of the potential enablers for those scenarios is the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm where machines with decision support systems interact and communicate among them. In an IoT environment, IPAs can interact with other smart objects in order to gain new knowledge and awareness about their users. This paper proposes a novel IoT-based mobile gateway solution for mobile health (m-Health) scenarios. This gateway autonomously collects information about the user/patient location, heart rate, and possible fall detection. Moreover, it forwards the collected information to a caretaker IPA, in real time, that will manage a set of actions and alarms appropriately. The algorithms used for each mobile gateway service, and the scenarios where the mobile gateway acts as a communication channel or a smart object are also addressed on this paper. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.