STEPSTONE: An Intelligent Integration Architecture for Personal Tele-Health

Abstract

STEPSTONE is a joint industry-university project to create open source technology that would enable the scalable, “friction-free” integration of device-based healthcare solutions into enterprise systems using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Specifically, STEPSTONE defines a first proposal to a Service Oriented Device Architecture (SODA) framework, and provides for initial reference implementations. STEPSTONE also intends to encourage a broad community effort to further develop the framework and its imple- mentations. In this paper, we present SODA, along with two implementation proposals of SODA’s device integration. We demonstrate the ease by which SODA was used to develop an end-to-end personal healthcare monitoring system. We also demonstrate the ease by which the STEPSTONE system was extended by other participants – Washington State University – to include additional devices and end user interfaces. We show clearly how SODA and therefore SODA devices make integration almost automatic, replicable, and scal- able. This allows telehealth system developers to focus their energy and attention on the system functionality and other important issues, such as usability, privacy, persuasion and outcome assessment studies.