Fhir Fli: An Open Source Platform For Storing, Sharing And Analysing Lifestyle Data

Consumers and healthcare organisations alike are increasingly interested in using digital health solutions to reduce the risk of chronic conditions or to help manage these conditions outside hospitals. Equally, there is a strong public health benefit in helping individuals adopt and improve healthy lifestyle behaviours. The first step in this direction is the ability to record and analyse lifestyle data. Currently, lifestyle logging platforms use proprietary data formats. Data is segregated among different platforms, impacting consumers, service providers, research institutes and public health bodies. Our aim is to facilitate the transfer of information between individuals and organisations that hold or require their lifestyle data. We demonstrate that an open source platform based on a clinically recognised interoperability standard - Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) - can meet both consumers and industry needs. We use as an example the case of people managing arthritis. Our contributions are: (i) an extension of the FHIR standard for lifestyle data, (ii) a reference architecture for a Personal Lifestyle Record, (iii) integration with voice-enabled digital assistants for lifestyle data capture and (iv) an open source implementation of this architecture that retrieves, saves and analyses lifestyle data from wearable devices.