Flexible and timely on-line integration of medical services using iLand middleware

Abstract

Modern medical systems are intensive in the use of distribution technology in medical services. Communication among professionals and patients is enabled to exchange patient information, and for on-line monitoring of health conditions. A miriad of specialized middleware solutions that have appeared in this domain, typically focus on providing more and more patient-data processing services over basic communication backbones (e.g., from pure socket communication to more sophisticated interaction models). Paradigms such as service oriented architectures and decoupled communication middleware support the development of emerging medical systems based on the composition of existing (posibly remote) services into a new application. This adjusts to the phylosophy of systems of systems (SoS) development. In a cyber-physical medical domain, service based applications require support for this composition in a way that a new application is created (or simply modified) in a timely fashion. iLand middleware supports this phylosophy, enabling both off-line and run-time reconfiguration of distributed service based applications. It provides timely operation, controlled communication delays, and a decoupled interaction model for stateless services. iLand has been used in medical applications for remote patient monitoring and in surveillance domains for remote real-time video transmission. This paper presents the systems that iLand has enabled in the medical domain, mainly based on remote patient monitoring. These iLand-based systems have shown to be flexible and capable of undergoing timely service reconfigurations.