Remote configuration and deployment of sensor drivers for a medical bluetooth sensor gateway

Outpatient nursing services expend a vast amount of time for manual nursing documentation and management of patient basic claims data. Context-driven acquisition of sensor data, documentation of observations and their automated processing can reduce this time, while availability of documented information increases. Usage of wireless sensors is a major element of long-term measurement of medical patient context. Currently a technical experienced nurse, patient or an additional technical service provider is needed on site to configure new sensors and pair them with the patient´s or nurse´s monitoring device. To ease configuration and maintenance this paper proposes a technique for remote configuration of a sensor gateway and secure automated pairing with Bluetooth sensors. For security reasons this paper presents a generic sensor driver interpreting XML-based protocol specifications to execute the protocol thus avoiding the installation of additional sensor drivers in the operating system for each new sensor. The concept is proven by a theoretical analysis and by an evaluation of the implementation.