Towards self-organization of networked medical devices

Soaring costs and an aging society originate the need for novel technologies in health care sector. Especially telemedicine and AAL systems are often promoted as such. Enabling patients to stay in their domestic environment while reducing costs due to hospital visits seems to be an evaluable opportunity on the one hand but introduces a lot of challenges, like interoperability and security, on the other. Interoperability is the main challenge to put emphasis on, when thinking of networks of medical devices recording patients vital data while acting in a plug-and-play manner. Thus, standards are needed that enable manufacturers to build interoperable medical devices and provide solutions for cost effective and easy to use telemedicine systems. Therefore this paper analyzes the ISO/IEEE11073 PHD standard towards its applicability in such environments, where the focus lies on self-organization and plug-and-play functionality. Furthermore we want to present research done on telemedicine/AAL systems during the SmartSenior project as well as introduce our own ISO/IEEE11073 implementation, which served as a basis for our analysis.