British perspectives on the Internet of Things. The Clouds of Things-Health use case

In 1941, Herbert Marcuse predicted that ubiquitous technology would have changed the concept itself of rationality. This paper does not aim at measuring the impact on rationality of a ‘growing technical ensemble of things and relations’, but Marcuse’s idea helps us understand that the Internet of Things should make us rethink some fundamental principles. Therefore, it is crucial to study this (relatively) new phenomenon with a multidisciplinary pragmatic approach that, moving from a relatively complex use case, touches some of the main technical and legal issues emerging from it and from the Clouds of Things, the intersection of the Internet of Things and cloud computing. After a clarification of the concepts of Internet of Things and Clouds of Things and having shed light on the complexity of the relevant ecosystem (especially as regards the actors involved), the author proposes a taxonomy of eHealth and finally narrow down to the CoT-Health use case. In particular, the focus of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it explores some legal aspects – mainly data-protection related – of mobile health (mHealth), a field without clear regulations and it usually is not even considered as part of eHealth. Alongside, it narrows down to a CoT-health scenario centred on the so-called repurposing. With regards to the latter, some considerations about liability are presented. The decentralisation of healthcare, big data and the patient’s empowerment made possible by CoT-Health appear as the best strategy to face the challenges of healthcare in the 21st century.