IoTA: IoT automated SIP-based emergency call triggering system for general eHealth purposes

The expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) and the evolution in communication technologies have enabled homes, cars even whole cities to be network connected. However, during an emergency incident, IoT devices have not been used to trigger emergency calls directly to healthcare providers mainly due to their constrained capabilities and lack of support session-oriented communications. Moreover, emergency services are currently offered by public safety stakeholders that do not support call triggering by IoT devices. This paper proposes IoTA framework which enables IoT devices to generate automatically emergency calls and support bi-directional communication sessions between healthcare providers and end users. The IoTA framework incorporates intelligent algorithms for processing and evaluating emergency events from various devices and performs emergency calls immediately after the occurrence of an event. The healthcare providers can interact with the IoTA framework requesting continuous real-time sensor data. A prototype implementation and initial evaluation results are presented as a proof of concept for people suffering from diverse chronic diseases. Experimental results have shown that the proposed framework can be considered as a promising solution for detecting, reporting emergency events, eliminating the hoax calls and responding swiftly saving lives.