Standard-based Middleware Platform for Medical Sensor Networks and u-Health

Advances in Information and Communication Technologies, ICT, are bringing new opportunities in the field of middleware systems oriented to ubiquitous environments and wearable devices used for patient telemonitoring. At a time of such challenges, this paper arises from the need to identify robust technical telemonitoring solutions that are both open and interoperable in home or mobile scenarios. These middleware systems demand standardized solutions to be cost effective and to take advantage of standardized operation and interoperability. Thus, a fundamental challenge is to design a plug-&-play platform that, either as individual elements or as components, can be incorporated in a simple way into different telecare systems, perhaps configuring a personal user network. Moreover, there is an increasing market pressure from companies not traditionally involved in medical markets, asking for a standard for Personal Health Devices (PHD), which foresee a vast demand for telemonitoring, wellness, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and applications for ubiquitous-Health (u-Health). However, the newly emerging situations imply very strict requirements for the protocols involved in the communication. The ISO/IEEE11073 (X73) family of standards is adapting to new personal devices, implementing high quality sensors, and supporting wireless transport (e.g. Bluetooth) and the access to faster and reliable communication network resources. Its optimized version (X73-PHD) is adequate for this new technology snapshot and might appear the best-positioned international standards to reach this goal. This work presents an updated survey of this standard and its implementation in a middleware telemonitoring platform.