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which relies on SOA and cloud computing
technologies, and describes the monitoring process.
Section 4 presents the implementation and the
experiments we conducted. Section 5 concludes the
paper and highlights some future works.
2 RELATED WORK
Several research works and initiatives have
investigated the challenges of building e-health
solutions. These solutions differ on how they tackle
the integration issue given the heterogeneity of
systems, middleware, and architectures used to build
an e-Health system. Xiang et al. (Xiang et al., 2003)
proposed a distributed framework for a Web-based
telemedicine system, which uses CORBA
technology and a database fragmented on different
sites. The system requires an intermediary
middleware to handle the heterogeneity of heath
systems and huge development effort to adapt the
system to the integrated system requirements.
In (Omar and Bendiab, 2006), the authors
proposed a multi-layer SOA-based e-Health services
architecture, which has six main components that
define the interactions among the layers. The system
is generic. However, it describes only the
architectural design without detailing the
implementation and its challenges. In addition, their
proposed system hasn’t been implemented. Kart, F.
et al. (Kart et al., 2008) described a distributed e-
healthcare system that uses SOA as a mean of
designing, implementing, and managing healthcare
services. The users of the system are physicians,
nurses, pharmacists, and other professionals, as well
as patients. The system includes a clinic module, a
pharmacy module, and patient’s interfaces, which
are implemented as Web services. Various devices
can interact with these modules, including desktop
and server computers, Personal Digital Assistants
and smart phones, and even electronic medical
devices, such as blood pressure monitors.
The authors in (Hsieh et al., 2007) described the
design, the implementation, and the deployment of a
multi-tier Inpatient Healthcare Information System
based on SOA and on the HL7 message exchange
standard at the National Taiwan University Hospital
(NTUH). The services-tier includes Computerized-
Physician Order Entry (CPOE), Billing, Pharmacy,
and Diet. The authors in (Juneja et al., 2009)
investigated how healthcare organizations, using
SOA, can leverage their shared services to automate
multiple business processes and reinforce overall
interoperability. The authors in (Yang et al., 2008)
designed and developed a SOA-based platform for
home-care delivery to patients with chronic diseases.
This work shares some of the goals with our project
with regards to monitoring chronic diseases patients.
To promote interoperability among healthcare
organizations that are seeking to develop SOA-based
architectures, a joint collaboration effort among
standards groups, specifically HL7 and the Object
Management Group (OMG), was formed under the
name: Healthcare Services Specification Project
(HSSP). This effort intends to develop health
industry SOA standards. The intent of HSSP is to
produce standard services that define services’
responsibilities, behaviour, and interfaces so that
ubiquity can be achieved across implementations
and vendor products (HL7 and OMG, 2008).
Our solution is aligned with above initiatives and
addresses mainly the chronic diseases monitoring
and prevention. It also addresses some difficult
issues in the design of an e-health system and
protection of medical data. Our solution relies on
SOA to integrate different systems, data, and make it
available for CDs monitoring, and prevention. The
net implication of using SOA in our solution is that
it facilitates interoperation among various systems
that typically do not speak the same language. Using
a common SOA reduces the complexity of the
integration of heterogeneous systems. New services
can be developed to satisfy the needs of integration,
and existing system capabilities can also be
organized into services.
3 HEALTH MONITORING
ARCHITECTURE
3.1 Architecture Overview
Figure 1 depicts our proposed architecture for health
monitoring that allows the collection of health data
of patients and its dissemination to healthcare
professionals anytime and from everywhere. The
architecture takes advantage of the recent advances
in sensing technology, wireless and broadband
communication, computing capabilities of handheld
devices, services’ delivery, and cloud computing to
enable smart monitoring of patient’s vital health
parameters. Each layer of the architecture includes a
set of components that interact to provide an
integrated solution for monitoring patients’ health.
Non-Invasive Sensing Layer: this layer includes
various devices (e.g. sensors, smart-phones), which
sense one or more health parameters such as
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