ISO/IEEE 11073 Treadmill Interoperability Framework and its Test Method: Design and Implementation

BACKGROUND: Regular physical activity is proven to help prevent and treat noncommunicable diseases such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and breast and colon cancer. The exercise data generated by health and fitness devices (eg, treadmill, exercise bike) are very important for health management service providers to develop personalized training programs. However, at present, there is little research on a unified interoperability framework in the health and fitness domain, and there are not many solutions; besides, the privatized treadmill data transmission scheme is not conducive to data integration and analysis. OBJECTIVE: This article will expand the IEEE 11073-PHD standard protocol family, develop standards for health and fitness device (using treadmill as an example) based on the latest version of the 11073-20601 optimized exchange protocol, and design protocol standards compliance testing process and inspection software, which can automatically detect whether the instantiated object of the treadmill meets the standard. METHODS: The study includes the following steps: (1) Map the data transmitted by the treadmill to the 11073-PHD objects; (2) Construct a programming language structure corresponding to the 11073-PHD application protocol data unit (APDU) to complete the coding and decoding part of the test software; and (3) Transmit the instantiated simulated treadmill data to the gateway test software through transmission control protocol for standard compliance testing. RESULTS: According to the characteristics of the treadmill, a data exchange framework conforming to 11073-PHD is constructed, and a corresponding testing framework is developed; a treadmill agent simulation is implemented, and the interoperability test is performed. Through the designed testing process, the corresponding testing software was developed to complete the standard compliance testing of the treadmill. CONCLUSIONS: The extended research of IEEE 11073-PHD in the field of health and fitness provides a potential new idea for the data transmission framework of sports equipment such as treadmills, which may also provide some help for the development of sports health equipment interoperability standards.