A novel Software Development Kit (SDK) to Foster adoption of health informatics standards in Personal Health Device (PHD) communications

Abstract

As health care becomes distributed and wireless (home monitoring, M-Health, AmI), system interoperability becomes a challenge. The solution seems to be to use international health informatics standards. Among these, ISO/IEEE 11073 (X73PHD) is the best suited for interoperability of Personal Health Devices (PHDs). Nevertheless, given that low cost, wearable PHDs have limited hardware resources, it is required a deep control to adapt a base source code and generate a fully highly-optimized X73PHD-compliant device. This article presents a novel Software Development Kit (SDK) that generates X73PHD source code for fully-optimized, X73PHD-compliant agents. The developer defines the objects of the Domain Information Model (DIM), its attributes, and the Finite State Machine (FSM) in the initial modeling phase. After that, the SDK automatically generates an optimized source code in additional phases: model checking, construction, transformation, optimization, and generation. Finally, during the integration phase, the developer manually incorporates the generated source code in its implementation. Given that the SDK follows the Patterns-based Methodology previously presented by the authors, the results are highly optimized in terms of processor usage (latency) and memory requirements (footprint). If the SDK was used by developers, it could accelerate the adoption of X73PHD. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.