Intelligent device management in the selfcare marketplace

Over the last ten years the Internet has emerged as a key infrastructure for service innovation, enabling IP (Internet Protocol) to become the wide area network communication protocol of choice. The natural result of this choice is that service providers and their customers are looking for ways to optimise costs by migrating existing services and applications onto IP as well. A good example is the medical industry, which is transitioning to Internet-based communications as the field of telemedicine broadens to preventative and self healthcare. However, technology is changing quickly and consumers face an array of choices to satisfy their healthcare needs with numerous devices from different vendors. Seamless healthcare device networking can play a major role in automating and safeguarding the process of collecting and transferring medical data, remote patient monitoring and reducing costs through remote equipment monitoring. In this scope, we describe an approach augmenting the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) with healthcare services in order to form a framework for efficient collection and storage of measurements, aiming to address the issues of the lack of a standardised data interface for consumer healthcare technologies (including hardware and protocols) and the lack of a standardised format for self-collected healthcare data (including the storage medium). In this framework, measurements can be seamlessly collected and stored as XML notes located virtually anywhere, such as the user's home or mobile device. Additionally, these notes can be accessed locally or remotely by doctors and specialists. Also, we discuss how this approach supports user mobility by proxying and redirecting requests to the user's current location and how it can remove the complexity of using consumer healthcare technologies from different vendors connected to different devices and the opportunities for Independent Software Vendors to develop additional services.