Agent-based decentralised data-acquisition and time-synchronisation in critical healthcare applications

AAL platforms for health and care purposes are designed to be used by diverse stakeholders, such as household residents, carers and healthcare professionals, with equally diverse needs. Reducing the latency of such systems is key to achieving a positive user experience, as well as enabling appropriate responses to critical incidents. This paper introduces a distributed middleware solution that can improve data-acquisition, run computational algorithms locally and seamlessly deliver notifications to various subscribers. The paper further describes three time-synchronisation methods to achieve correct time-stamping of packets, using a combination of centralised and distributed packet processing.