Testing Real-World Healthcare IoT Application: Experiences and Lessons Learned

Abstract

Healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) applications require rigorous testing to ensure their dependability. Such applications are typically integrated with various third-party healthcare applications and medical devices through REST APIs. This integrated network of healthcare IoT applications leads to REST APIs with complicated and interdependent structures, thus creating a major challenge for automated system-level testing. We report an industrial evaluation of a state-of-the-art REST APIs testing approach (RESTest) on a real-world healthcare IoT application. We analyze the effectiveness of RESTest's testing strategies regarding REST APIs failures, faults in the application, and REST API coverage, by experimenting with six REST APIs of 41 API endpoints of the healthcare IoT application. Results show that several failures are discovered in different REST APIs with ≈56% coverage using RESTest. Moreover, nine potential faults are identified. Using the evidence collected from the experiments, we provide our experiences and lessons learned. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging; Software verification and validation.

Model‐based digital twins of medicine dispensers for healthcare IoT applications

“…In practice, we have observed that a physical medicine dispenser can also malfunction during testing. 22 Since medicine dispensers (or other medical devices) are not the SUT, the DT fidelity level achieved by our approach is sufficient to support the automated testing of healthcare IoT applications (SUT). Furthermore, it is worth noting that the fidelity does not decrease with the increase in the number of DTs, which is a significant benefit for testing healthcare IoT applications with hundreds of medicine dispensers.…”