Towards semantics in wearable sensors: The role of transducers electronic data sheets (TEDS) ontology in sensor networks

Sensors, actuators and event sensors are the major types of transducers recognized by the IEEE 21451 standards for Smart Transducers. These contain information embedded in the Transducer Electronic Data Sheets (TEDS) that help describe the transducer and identify it in a network. Advancement in sensor and information technologies has led to various designs and development in wearable medical devices e.g. wireless Electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring devices used to measure heart physiological parameters for diagnosis and monitoring of patients' health remotely. Most wearables were designed and proposed on IEEE 11073 standards, while, advances in implementation and application of smart transducers are based on ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 standards. Therefore, seamless integration and interoperability between sensing technology in wearable and Health Information Systems (HIS) requires attention on the interoperability opportunities at the semantic level. The proposed ontology was implemented using Protege, SPARQL was used to evaluate it, and the performance analysis shows the greater description of the transducers with improve rate of recall and enhance interoperability at the semantic level.