Remote medical treatment at home using the Java Mobile Sensor API

Since wireless sensor networks are successfully deployed in real life scenarios, applications in medical health-care, structural control, homeland security etc. become feasible. In those envisioned applications, easy maintenance and usability become crucial to staff members, e.g., to doctors or nurses. Not only for widespread distribution of hundreds of sensors, but also in tele-medical applications, remotely-controlled sensing and maintenance without direct access to sensors is required. For this purpose we present a middleware abstraction based on the standard Java Mobile Sensor API (JSR-256). It allows transparent access to sensor measurements, sensor information and maintenance data, which appear as local sensor resources to the user even if the sensors are connected via network. Hence, the user neither requires technical skills nor location information to request sensor data. This paper gives an architectural and functional overview of our middleware within the context of telemedicine. We demonstrate how our middleware approach supports patient monitoring for pre- and post-operative treatment at home.