XMPP-enabled SOA-driven middleware for remote patient monitoring system

Abstract

Advances in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) will allow a range of medical applications that will significantly improve the quality of health care. Nevertheless we need to achieve the ease of use and the ease of configuration for the WBAN to be tapped. In this paper we propose a service-oriented (SOA) middleware design for WBAN, as a way to simplify application development by providing abstraction of complex low-level concepts. In the proposed architecture, sensors are coordinated by a gateway node, which in turn retransmits data to a remote central unit and receives WBAN control information and queries from this central unit. Based on predefined thresholds and rules, alarms will be sent from the gateway node to predefined medical staff. We propose employing extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) protocol to ensure real-time event notification and scalable design. The design allows storing sensors data, sensor reconfiguration and resource management. The target user is a patient who needs regular monitoring. WBAN in this case shall increase patient comfort and reduces periodical checkups allowing remote monitoring. We believe that the use of Web Services and standardizing the messages exchanged is a potential solution for interoperability and ease of use and configuration challenges. This will attract more application developers to this field, leading to more innovative applications. We also believe that the use of XMPP protocol will satisfy real-time event notification and scalability design requirements for the middleware.