Resource Discovery in Ubiquitous Health Care

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing is an emerging paradigm for health care environments, in which devices must blend into the background unobtrusively, collaborating to provide value-added services for users. Insufficient information flow and coordination are some of the main concerns in a ubiquitous health care environment. Resources are, therefore, essential to the success of this technology and, as a result, both resource discovery and management play a vital role in sustainable ubiquitous deployment. In this paper, we present a novel resource discovery mechanism for ubiquitous computing environments using Resource Index nodes (RIns) and mobile agents. The context information needed to process a query is identified and mobile agents are deployed to explore the ubiquitous environment for requested resources. We present a health care scenario and evaluate our proposed resource discovery method.