Performance evaluation of a generic driver for medical Bluetooth sensors

Outpatient nursing services expend a vast amount of time for manual documentation and management of patient basic claims data. Context-driven acquisition of sensor data, documentation of observations and their automated processing can reduce this time, while availability of documented information increases. Usage of wireless sensors is a major element of long-term measurement of medical data. Currently a technical experienced nurse, patient or an additional technical service provider is needed on site to configure new sensors and connect them with the patient´s or nurse´s monitoring device. To ease configuration and maintenance this paper proposes a technique for remote configuration of a sensor gateway and secure automated pairing with Bluetooth sensors. This paper presents a generic sensor driver that is interpreting XML-based protocol specifications to execute the protocol, thus avoiding the installation of additional sensor drivers in the operating system for each new sensor. It evaluates its performance compared to a binary driver. The concept is proven by an evaluation of the implementation.