Modular Integration Through Aspects: Making Cents of Legacy Systems

Recently, Continua Health Alliance has brought together a powerhouse team, including Cisco, IBM, Motorola and others, for personal telehealth products and services. This team can provide commodity interoperable healthcare devices and services by introducing new connectivity standards for health management tools. But the costs of integrating and configuring disparate system services have proven to be prohibitive in this domain- healthcare processes require extreme agility to assimilate information across traditional boundaries. As a result, these tools must work effectively with dynamic business processes that often elude cost-effective integration themselves. This creates a requirement for software to be fluidly configurable and interoperable in order to best support personalized care with truly integrated solutions. We believe that, without a new technology for the seamless integration of features within healthcare devices, costs associated with attempts to fuse IT with dynamic business processes can continue to be an obstacle in modern patient care. Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) is focused on novel notions of modularity that crosscut traditional abstraction boundaries. AOSD techniques and tools, applied at all stages of the software lifecycle, are changing the way software is developed in a wide spectrum of application domains, ranging from embedded systems to enterprise IT. This paper outlines the ways in which aspects could aid the integration and evolution of software used to support modern healthcare practices across this spectrum, with examples at each stage. We believe the key principle of AOSD - the modularization of crosscutting concerns - to be an integral part of the solution to the challenges currently facing modern health service infrastructures