RESUMEN
INTRODUCTION: This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on "Using Data from Ambient Assisted Living and Smart Homes in Electronic Health Records". OBJECTIVES: In this paper, we present a prototype of a Home-Centered Health-Enabling Technology (HET-HC), which is able to capture, store, merge and process data from various sensor systems at people's home. In addition, we present an architecture designed to integrate HET-HC into an exemplary regional Health Information System (rHIS). METHODS: rHIS are traditionally document-based to fit to the needs in a clinical context. However, HET-HC are producing continuous data streams for which documents might be an inappropriate representation. Therefore, the HET-HC could register placeholder-documents at rHIS. These placeholder-documents are assembled upon user-authenticated request by the HET-HC and are always up-to-date. Moreover, it is not trivial to find a clinical coding system for continuous sensor data and to make the data machine-readable in order to enhance the interoperability of such systems. Therefore, we propose the use of SNOCAP-HET, which is a nomenclature to describe the context of sensor-based measurements in health-enabling technologies. RESULTS: We present an architectural approach to integrate HET-HC into rHIS. Our solution is the centralized registration of placeholder-documents with rHIS and the decentralized data storage at people's home. CONCLUSIONS: We concluded that the presented architecture of integrating HET-HC into rHIS might fit well to the traditional approach of document-based data storage. Data security and privacy issues are also duly considered.
