SensorMed: A lightweight software library for pervasive healthcare systems

Pervasive Healthcare Systems (PHS) constitute a research field that examines a wide range of technologies for the development of healthcare applications. Due to the data-centric nature of such applications, a number of challenges exist, notably combining the data generated from heterogeneous Distributed Sensor/Actuator Networks (DSANs) and maintaining application software as underlying technologies evolve. Coupling the technological features of DSANs with healthcare application software results in every sensor upgrade requiring a corresponding software upgrade, leading to constrained interoperability and degraded efficiency for the PHS. Consequently, a requirement exists to decouple technological features of DSANs operating within pervasive healthcare spaces from the corresponding healthcare applications. In this paper, the Sen-sorMed software library is introduced. SensorMed aims to address the issues related to the provision of homogeneous access to heterogeneous DSANs in an open and interoperable manner. Details of the architecture, highlighting interactions that promote the interoperability and portability of SensorMed, are presented.