## 1 Introduction
The IoT plays an important role in healthcare, for example, in general remote vital sign monitoring of patients [19], as well as in specific chronic disease treatment, such as diabetes therapy management [20]. Within the personal healthcare sector, many portable and wearable medical and fitness devices are being pushed to the consumer market by various vendors. This can be seen as a positive trend towards the self-empowerment of a healthier lifestyle and enables healthcare workers to more efficiently keep track of their patients' health conditions by means of telecare, if such a feature is provided. Many vendors provide additional online services for devices they sell, enabling users to better visualize, store and share the gathered information from the devices through the Internet. However, many of these services are integrated with the devices following a closed vertical \"silo\" approach [21], where the devices can only be used with the provided services, and different services from other vendors cannot make use of the gathered information. The main disadvantage of this situation is the inability to combine information gathered from different devices produced by different vendors for better reasoning and decision making [22, 23]. To solve this issue, open interfaces (e.g., web service interfaces) have to be provided by device vendors, so that service developers can incorporate the information collected from the devices in their services. A common way to integrate devices and Internet-based services is to directly exchange messages between the two parties in a point-to-point manner. The downside of this approach is that devices that \"sense\" new information should deliver it to all services that are interested in consuming it, either through a push approach from the devices or in a pull fashion from the services. This can be a major drawback from an energy efficiency standpoint, as portable and wearable connected devices commonly run on batteries, and thus, sending similar information to many destinations (_i.e._, services) will lead to a shorter lifetime of the devices. With the proliferation of mobile cloud computing usage in recent years [24, 25, 26], a brokered approach with a service broker being deployed in the cloud can be a good alternative, since the devices need to connect to the Internet in order to communicate with Internet-based services anyway. The service broker will handle the message delivery tasks to all interested services, so that the devices only need to send the collected information once. A publish/subscribe messaging pattern is advantageous in such a broker, so that services interested in specific information can subscribe to that particular information and get notification from the broker whenever new information is available. However, such a service broker can be seen as a single point of failure, since various devices and services rely on it, and thus, its dependability is very crucial. An information integration platform (IIP), which acts as a service broker between connected devices and Internet-based services, has been proposed and developed as a prototype. Several services within the healthcare domain, mainly related to telecare, have been developed on top of the platform, as well. This paper will briefly describe the main functionalities of the platform, while focusing more on its dependability aspects. Prototype services on top of it will be described to put the platform into a deployment context within the healthcare domain.