Quality of Service, Adaptation, and Security Provisioning in Wireless Patient Monitoring Systems

Modern patient monitoring systems are designed to put the individual into the centre of the system architecture. In this paradigm, the patient is seen as a source of health-relevant data that are processed and transferred. Patient monitoring systems are used in health care enterprises as well as in paramedic, mobile, and home situations to foster ambient assisted living (AAL) scenarios. There are a multitude of standards and products available to support Quality of Service (QoS) and security goals in patient monitoring systems. Yet, an architecture that supports these goals from data aggregation to data transmission and visualisation for end user has not been developed. Medical data from patient monitoring systems includes sampled values from measurements, sound, images, and video. These data often have a time-aspect where several data streams need to be synchronised. Therefore, rendering data from patient monitoring systems can be considered an advanced form of multimedia data.
We propose a framework that will fill this QoS and security gap and provide a solution that allows medical personnel better access to data and more mobility to the patients. The
framework is based on MPEG-21 and wireless sensor networks. It allows for end-to-end optimisation and presentation of multimedia sensor data. The framework also addresses the
QoS, adaptation and security concerns of handling this data.
In Section 2 we present background on patient monitoring systems, their requirements and how we envision communication is handled. We present communication systems in Section 3 and how to treat QoS in Section 4. A short introduction to data streaming, binary XML and how they relate to patient monitoring systems is presented in Section 5. In Section 6 we our proposed solution for the framework and present a security analysis of it in Section 7. Finally,
we offer our conclusions in Section 8.