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to be managed remotely. The system implemented
has an agent unit, which includes a vital signals acqui-
sition module, can acquire ECG (electrocardiogram)
data and forward ECG data to medical service center.
It uses Web Services to all services communicate with
one another but no mention to any Electronic Health
Record (EHR) standard is done.
2.2 e-Health Technologies
Health patient data must be transmitted and saved in
a standard known by the involved systems. An EHR
refers to an individual patient’s medical record in dig-
ital format. An EHR standards comparative study
(Blobel and Pharow, 2006) describes HL7 and EN
13606 standards.
2.2.1 HL7
Health Level Seven (HL7) (Hutchison et al., 1996) is
a widely applied protocol to exchange clinical data.
Several versions are been developed by the HL7 or-
ganization, part of American National Standard Insti-
tution (ANSI) and founded in 1987. HL7 v3 is not re-
viewed in this article because it’s a complex standard
and there isn’t an stable version (Smith and Ceusters,
2006).
The HL7 refers to seventh OSI layer (application)
although also specifies a layer 6 presentation proto-
col made up of its own abstract message format and
encoding rules. Concerning the lower layers, like ses-
sion and transport services, is rather vague because
HL7 authors intention was to support a wide variety
of systems. The underlying HL7 operational model
is that of a client-server system. HL7 distinguishes
between two messages exchange scenarios: trigger
events/unsolicited messages and queries. The com-
munication paradigm in HL7 is the trigger event. For
example, when a patient is admitted to a hospital, the
admission system will propagate HL7 admission mes-
sages to the appropriate subsystems to inform them of
the new patient’s data. An HL7 message always con-
tains all the information required to complete a trans-
action and is encoded in HL7 own rules. The standard
allows defining site-specific extensions segments, like
message extensions to exchange data with an appoint-
ment system. However, the use of these extensions
can prompt serious interoperability problems.
2.2.2 EN 13606
Health informatics - Electronic Health Record Com-
munication standard (EN 13606) is a European offi-
cial standard of CEN (European Committee for Stan-
dardization) and ISO standard approved. The over-
all goal is define rigorous and stable information ar-
chitecture for communicating part or all of the EHR
of a patient. It’s based on the HL7 RIM (Reference
Information Model) from HL7 v3, a set of datatype
definitions harmonized between HL7 and CEN. EN
13606 is flexible to represent the information struc-
tures transmitted thanks to the archetypes, a knowl-
edge representation of the clinic information domain.
Moreover, is robust face of changes in the specifi-
cations because the archetypes changes don’t require
implementing new underlying systems.
The openEHR framework (www.openehr.org) is
consistent with the EN 13606 and it’s beginning to be
utilized in commercial systems throughout the world.
2.2.3 ISO/IEEE 11073
A brief description of novel standards for personal
tele-health systems interoperability can be placed in
(Schmitt et al., 2007). The standards goal, often also
referred to as Medical Information Bus (MIB), or x73
standards, is to enable medical devices to intercon-
nect and interoperate with other medical devices. The
standards cover the upper OSI layers and use well-
known IEEE standards like Bluetooth (802.15.1) or
WLAN (802.11) in lower layers. Part of x73 stan-
dards focus on point-of-care medical devices commu-
nication are mainly designed for acute monitoring and
treatment application in the hospital domain like In-
tensive Care Unit. Several x73 standard series are cur-
rently draft versions or further research projects and
they have not been adopted by the industry yet.
3 e-HEALTH SERVICE
INTEGRATED OPEN
PLATFORM
Our proposal design attempts to integrate several
smart home services to providea scalable and interop-
erability e-health solution. We describe the platform
below.
3.1 Overview
The system is divided in three basic subsystems: do-
motic, multimedia and e-health subsystem. In the
home can exits different devices from each subsys-
tem connected by wire or wireless to a RGW with an
embedded OSGi framework. Blood-pressure monitor
and personal scale are examples of integrated devices
in the medical network.
The automation platform Lonworks
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LonWorks) is choosed
OPEN PLATFORM FOR e-HEALTH SERVICES
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