A Domain-Specific Language for Ubiquitous Healthcare

The development of ubiquitous healthcare applications has proved to be significantly more complex than traditional healthcare applications. In software engineering research, there are two approaches of interest to us for handling the kind of complexity that emerges. The first is the use of domain-specific languages, which abstracts the low-level domain knowledge required when using general-purpose programming languages into more expressive domain-specific constructs. The second is advanced modularity techniques, such as aspect-oriented programming, that provide for modularisation of concerns that complicate code by cutting across a broad code base and tangling with other concerns. In this paper, we identify a set of ubiquitous healthcare concerns that complicate their software development. We use advanced modularity techniques to provide good separation of these concerns and encapsulate their behaviour within a new domain-specific language, ALPH that provides the application developer with a high level of abstraction. The result is a means to develop ubiquitous healthcare applications more easily and in a more timely fashion, while improving software quality by increasing modularity in the code.