Enabling context-awareness: A service oriented architecture implementation for a hospital use case

The medical field is continuously flooded with newer technologies and tools for automating all kinds of medical care processes. There are a variety of software solutions and platforms for enabling smart healthcare and for assisting care providers such as doctors, nurses, surgeons and specialists with all kinds of timely insights to diagnose and decide the correct course of actions. There are patient monitoring and expert systems to simplify and streamline healthcare service design, development, and delivery. However there are concerns and challenges with the multiplicity and heterogeneity of technologies and solutions. The dense heterogeneous medical devices available in the intensive therapy units pose a challenge of medical device integration. Needless to say, lot of research work has gone in devising techniques in integrating these systems for exchange of data. However mere device integration does not exploit the modern technologies until meaningful and critical information is presented to doctors and patient care personals adapting to the changes in the patient condition. The goal of this research is to apply context aware computing using service oriented architecture in acquiring, analysing and assisting doctors and nurses with necessary information for easy and critical time saving decision making. This paper presents an implementation of the identified web services which can be consumed during a treatment at the Intensive Therapy Unit (ITU).