ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Digit. Health
Sec. Health Informatics
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2025.1636775
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital Health Innovations for Patient-Centered CareView all 29 articles
Streamlining Wearable Data Integration for EHDS: A Case Study on Advancing Healthcare Interoperability Using Garmin Devices and FHIR
Provisionally accepted
- 1Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention (LBG), Salzburg, Austria
- 2Edenlab, Innovative Digital Health Solutions, Estonia, Tallinn, Estonia
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The integration of Personal or Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) from wearable devices (such as smartwatches, sensors, and gadgets) into medical workflows has the potential to reform personalized healthcare, and disease management, especially in cardiovascular or chronic patients and preventive care as well. However, there are significant challenges to ensure about whole interoperability between wearable tools or platforms and healthcare standards, such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) or Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP). In this paper we applied the Garmin Vívoactive 4 smartwatch to investigate the compatibility of wearable devices and integration of their data into an FHIR server, leveraging the Fitrockr hub and API to support smooth data transfer and enhance interoperability. In addition, in deploying the Kodjin FHIR server in our practical work on the DH-Convener initiative (concept by establishing a connected health model to PGHD with Electronic Health Records), we utilized the Modular Open Research Platform (MORE) as well in this study to explore how PGHD can be integrated with other healthcare systems or EHRs while following to regulatory standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. Thus, this process contains a collection of real-time data from Garmin devices, mapping it to FHIR resources, and deploying an FHIR server to enable secure data transfer. The paper also shows the result of evaluating the compatibility of PGHD from the MORE platform with FHIR standards, demonstrating the ability to transform and structure diverse health data into interoperable formats. The results of our prototyping confirm that the data integration from wearable devices and transferring these health data into healthcare systems is feasible, scalable, and compliant with international standards, contributing to the ongoing effort to bridge the gap between PGHD and medical decision making systems.
Keywords: Patient-generated health data (PGHD), FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), Healthcare Interoperability, wearable devices, data integration
Received: 28 May 2025; Accepted: 20 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Abedian, Yesakov, Ostrovskiy and Hussein. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Somayeh Abedian, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention (LBG), Salzburg, Austria
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