A Comparison of Data Traffic in Standardized Personal Health Monitoring Solutions

The publication of the HL7-FHIR standard offers new possibilities for integrated applications in healthcare. Although trial implementations have only recently started, the application of FHIR in context of a Personal Health Monitoring solution is worth investigating. Most of the existing telemonitoring solutions in healthcare rely on guidelines defined by the Continua Health Alliance (CHA). This paper compares the requirements of CHA and HL7-FHIR with respect to data traffic between client devices and server side applications. Therefore an existing CHA-compliant telemonitoring solution is extended towards supporting HL7-FHIR. Both approaches were simultaneously evaluated in a live system with 68 participants. The results of the evaluation show that the FHIR approach offers the possibility of reducing data traffic in comparison to the CHA solution.