Plug&Care-Connector – a middleware to reduce costs and create platform independence in telemonitoring programs

Kurzfassung

Connectivity is a problem in telemedicine. Data has to be acquired from devices and transferred to the recipient. In europe at present telemonitoring programs especially focus on home monitoring. Only few of these projects support patient’s mobility. The technical setup in these projects usually requires identical devices for all participating patients. This applies to the communication device (e.g. a mobile phone or smart phone) and the medical device (e.g. a blood pressure meter) as well. To be able to use these devices patients have to be trained as well. Furthermore on travel patients use and carry their own phone containing all their contacts and further data. The idea of the Plug&Care-Connector (PCC) is to provide a technology that enables service providers to reduce costs in mobile or home monitoring setups. It’s a Java-based middleware for different operating systems like Android, Windows Mobile, PC-Windows, Apple-OS or Linux. The PCC consists of a core application designed for each of the mentioned operating systems. It abstracts the platforms interface medical devices connect to presenting one identical interface. Thus device manufacturers only need to develop one PCC-driver to be able to connect to all supported platforms. Patients are able to use their (PCC-compatible) smart phone or PC they are familiar with when participating in a telemonitoring program. If their medical device is PCC-compatible as well they can use it too. This can reduce technology costs significantly and can increase patient’s compliance as well. Furthermore the Plug&Care-Connector supports so called transmitters. Transmitters are plug-ins for the connector responsible to forward the acquired data of the medical device. Transmitters can easily be written using our developer guide. Transmitters hand over the data or to apps running locally (e.g. diabetes diaries) or forward it to remote recipients. Various messaging services and export to data bases and patient records are supported. The first version will be provided in the Android-market. We will test the Plug&Care-Connector with Diabetes patients within the EU-AAL-project EmotionAAL in Finland and Germany in early 2012.