A Middleware Architecture for Wireless Health Monitoring

A little bit about what I'm getting into these days.

We all know healthcare costs are going up. We've identified a class of applications that fall under the label Wireless Health Monitoring and are argued to help reduce these costs. Essentially, they're related to the remote observation of vital signs and behavior. They help reduce costs by keeping people out of a hospital bed, potentially moving the elderly from the nursing home to an assisted living facility, or moving them from assisted living to their own home (i.e. "aging in place").

Here's a diagram of the typical application:

A set of sensors is attached to the body and produces a set of signals for the application. We combine these inputs with other signals like the battery power of these devices and the network conditions to define an application context, organized through the Monitoring component and presented to the Decision Making Component as the current situation.

The Decision Making Component computes the severity of the situation and takes one of a set of possible actions. Low severity, indicating normal or expected vital signs, requires no action unless there is an outstanding request to service or a regular report to generate. As the severity increases, the application starts taking local action to increase the frequency or granularity of monitoring. A high severity level is reported to appropriate healthcare professionals, such as the patient's Primary Care Physician (PCP), nurses, or Emergency Responders.

The part I'm adding to this dance is the middleware architecture. This part takes responsibility for delivering messages from to and from the application, or, more formally, given a message, to deliver that message to all of the intended recipients. Here's a diagram outlining the components of the middleware:

We define a Location Service that looks up the most likely location of the recipients, patients, doctors, nurses, or emergency responders who could be at home, at work, in transit, or outside their normal routine. The location service uses their past known locations and potentially their calendar service to predict a likely location for the person. This location, if it's found, then aids in the routing component, which is responsible for finding a set of paths to the recipients.

My Task: Design the location service and the routing protocol

1. Design the location service and the routing protocol (or a bunch of possible designs)
2. Prove to you that they meet the needs of the application I just overviewed