Custos Remote on-demand healthcare aided with wireless sensors and mobile phones

Telemonitoring and remote healthcare are two ICT techniques promise to deliver cost effective long-term healthcare services to the aging population worldwide. Anticipating an emerging market opportunity, NCTU Kannon project team is creating Custos, an open composeable platform for developing remote on-demand healthcare applications using smart phones and wireless sensor networks. Custos is integrated readily with Internet web services and UPnP digital-home platform so that it can be used to detect abnormal health conditions through multi-sensor data fusion, adapt environment conditions to user needs, dispatch medical alerts and instigate remedial actions via SMS/RSS communication. Moreover, Custos is easy to program because it uses Sun SPOT and Squawk Java J2ME as its sensor/actuator hub. In this position paper, we present the design principles, system architecture and operation concepts of Custos as well as a pilot plan for clinical trials in the Geriatric Psychiatry Ward of Wei-Gong Memorial Hospital in Miaoli, Taiwan.