Thing Theory

As healthcare professionals and others embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart environment paradigms, developers will bear the brunt of constructing the IT relationships within these, making sense of the big data produced as a result, and managing the relationships between people and technologies. This chapter explores how PolySocial Reality (PoSR), a framework for representing how people, devices and communication technologies interact, can be applied to developing use cases combining IoT and smart environment paradigms, giving special consideration to the nature of location-aware messaging from sensors and the resultant data collection in a healthcare environment. Based on this discussion, the authors suggest ways to enable more robust intra-sensor messaging through leveraging social awareness by software agents applied in carefully considered healthcare contexts.