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A Body Area Network (BAN) is a collection of (inter) communicating devices, which are worn on the body, providing an integrated set of personalized services to the user. Several technologies required to construct a BAN that enables ambulant monitoring of a patients' health are emerging. However the suitability, integration and benefits of such technologies still have to be explored.
Research to advance the feasibility and integration of BANs is aimed at achieving ubiquitous healthcare.
Integrating existing and emerging technologies to achieve ubiquitous healthcare is one of the main technological challenges. Existing components such as sensor networks, cameras, mobile phones, PDAs, hospital information systems and EMRs must all be aligned and possibly adapted to achieve integrated support for ubiquitous healthcare. As a result, there is a need for:
Development of reflective distributed HealthBAN applications - such applications enable the HealthBAN to dynamically discover application needs such as security policies, storage and processing needs and QoS requirements.
Adaptive distributed service platforms - such platforms constitute the execution environment for the reflective distributed HealthBAN applications. It interconnects the HealthBAN with a healtcare center and is adaptive to changes in the network infrastructure. The service platform includes adaptive application protocols, heterogeneous network support, functions for auto discovery and -management and other generic infrastructure services.
Monitoring and control of end-to-end QoS - differentiated QoS support is an important feature of a ubiquitous healthcare service platform. End-to-end QoS for QoS critical applications must be monitored and possibly adapted.
Mapping application level QoS requirements to middleware and operating system QoS functions and mechanisms - HealthBAN applications express QoS requirements in terms of application level concepts (e.g. number of video frames/second or number of continuously monitored sensors). Such QoS requirements must be discovered, through the reflective application interface, and mapped to lower level resources.
Secure delivery of medical data to various healthcare centers - Delivery of medical data to healthcare centers is subject to various security requirements, which originate from healthcare centre policies and national and European legislation. A ubiquitous healthcare service platform must be flexible enough to deal with these security requirements.
Scalability - scaling of a ubiquitious healthcare service platform is required in the numerical, geographical and organizational dimensions (B.C. Neuman, 1994). Technology must facilitate economy of scale.
Service management - ubiquitous healthcare services must be paid by health consumers or their insurance company. This requires integrated management that governs various management domains. Management interfaces must be defined, in order to achieve integrated billing and accounting spanning the whole value chain.
One of the main challenges of a modern service provider is the management of a large scale ICT infrastructure. An ICT infrastructure is a set of processing and storage resources that are connected by one or more (tele)communication networks. A service provider not only faces the daily operational management of the ICT infrastructure, but at the strategic level must also manage the future development of the ICT infrastructure. An ICT infrastructure is constantly evolving as new services, new user requirements and innovative technologies become available.
To manage the technological changes in large scale ICT infrastructures, a service provider will benefit from technology that is designed for organic growth, is easy to adapt, contains many configurable and reusable software components and is easy to manage.
The area that promises these features, is the area of Open Distributed Processing, which combines object oriented technology with client/server computing. Service platforms based on these technologies are often referred to as Open Distributed Environments. An Open Distributed Environment consists of a network infrastructure, a middleware infrastructure and a number of application components.
The middleware platform is the (software) layer between service applications and processing and communication resources. Middleware platforms provide the mechanisms to support the distribution transparencies as defined in the ISO/ITU-T International Standard for the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (ODP). An important aspect of service provisioning based on Open Distributed Environments is the end-user Quality of Service (QoS). The QoS of services is determined by the application components, the middleware layer and the underlying network.
For traditional telecommunications service provisioning, attention is mainly focussed on the relationship between end-user QoS and characteristics of the network, e.g., throughput, jitter and delay. However, for current broadband multimedia services, end-user QoS is also determined by the application components, the middleware characteristics and the computer networks. My research focuses on the relationship of end-user QoS and how this can be supported transparently by an object middleware platform.