On Line Service Composition in the Integrated Clinical Environment for eHealth and Medical Systems

Abstract

Medical and eHealth systems are progressively realized in the context of standardized architectures that support safety and ease the integration of the heterogeneous (and often proprietary) medical devices and sensors. The Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) architecture appeared recently with the goal of becoming a common framework for defining the structure of the medical applications as concerns the safe integration of medical devices and sensors. ICE is simply a high level architecture that defines the functional blocks that should be part of a medical system to support interoperability. As a result, the underlying communication backbone is broadly undefined as concerns the enabling software technology (including the middleware) and associated algorithms that meet the ICE requirements of the flexible integration of medical devices and services. Supporting the on line composition of services in a medical system is also not part of ICE; however, supporting this behavior would enable flexible orchestration of functions (e.g., addition and/or removal of services and medical equipment) on the fly. iLandis one of the few software technologies that supports on line service composition and reconfiguration, ensuring time-bounded transitions across different service orchestrations; it supports the design, deployment and on line reconfiguration of applications, which this paper applies to service-based eHealth domains. This paper designs the integration between ICE architecture and iLand middleware to enhance the capabilities of ICE with on line service composition and the time-bounded reconfiguration of medical systems based on distributed services. A prototype implementation of a service-based eHealth system for the remote monitoring of patients is described; it validates the enhanced capacity of ICE to support dynamic reconfiguration of the application services. Results show that the temporal cost of the on line reconfiguration of the eHealth application is bounded, achieving a low overhead resulting from the addition of ICE compliance.

Integrating multicore awareness functions into distribution middleware for improving performance of distributed audio surveillance

“…Although there are some very ecient distribution software designs such as [29] (that supports real-time video transmission over dynamic distributed service-oriented systems) and has been applied in video-surveillance [30] as well as eHealth [31], etc., it is unaware of the underlying structure of nowadays multicore processors.…”

A Component Based Framework to Enable Medical Devices Communication

“…The Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) [6] aims to interconnect medical devices in a safe way by realizing interoperability between them in a high acuity patient situation, it's a solution to solve the problems generated by the heterogeneity of medical devices where every supplier has its own policy for devices interconnection and interfacing. ICE is simply a generic architecture to design medical devices and services that can be easily interconnected [11], consequently, ICE does not require the integration of a specific software technology design to define the behavior of the components of the architecture and how data is transferred between those components.…”