Image Upgrade

Slightly improved on my previous images.

I'm getting more into infographics for communicating information. They take much longer to create, but they communicate information at a higher bandwidth, meaning you pick up the information faster.

In this one, I'm splitting the concepts I need to discuss into a conceptual abstraction of these systems and an architectural outline for them (or for the one I'm proposing).

At the conceptual level, a patient exhibits a current Situation, which is the collection of his or her vital signs together with the environmental factors that not only influence those vital signs but also impact the system itself. This Situation is the target of the systems observation and monitoring efforts. By collecting a view of it, the system can make an assessment of the patient's current state and take any needed action, such has alerting a medical professional.

We implement this observation of the patient's situation with a set of sensors attached to the patient that organize into a body area network (a low power peer-to-peer wireless network). The sensors upload their data to a central coordinator in the body area network, which, having the collected information, can implement the algorithms to assess the patients state. It can then initiate the appropriate actions to respond to this assessment.

If communication with a medical professional is needed, the middleware component handles the details of passing that communication from the coordinator to the appropriate doctor, nurse, first responder, or technician. The system has to rely on the wireless networking infrastructure in the patient's environment (since we don't want to restrict where the patient goes), which makes it tough to make guarantees about how good the connection will be... if it even has one. The middleware hides all this, taking messages from the coordinator, connecting to WiFi and 3G/4G networks as needed, and delivering them when a path is found to their recipient.

This last piece is where my work will focus.