An Adaptive Middleware Applied to the Ad-hoc Nature of Cardiac Health Care

Heart disease is the number one killer in the civilized world, accounting for around 1.9 million people every year in the EU, with the associated annual health costs of approximately EUR 105 billion. Important aspects of treating cardiac problems are monitoring and directing critical data to key individuals. The middleware proposed in this paper interacts with ECG sensors and provides a dynamic decision making framework for forming critical decisions when defined thresholds are exceeded. The middleware and its defined services target the embedded device domain which has an existing large scale deployment within the healthcare sector. The services help to ease development and address problems like dynamic grouping, load balancing and providing a uniform level of abstraction from the underlying network

Service Group Management facilitated by DSL driven Policies in embedded Middleware

Middleware by its very nature is fundamental to the functioning of systems as it provides the communication between software components. It is very much an underlying technology and is rarely visible to end users. As systems develop, certain domain semantics, provided by the domain experts, need to be injected into the behaviour of the underlying middleware, but in a controlled manner. The methods used to achieve this are often static in nature, wholly dependent on how they are implemented, deployed and managed. An increasingly popular way to manage this behaviour injection is through the use of policies, a technique used to govern defined rules, triggered by associated events, resulting in specific actions when certain conditions are encountered. Strong efforts have been made throughout the evolution of software development methods and programming languages to solve the lack of dynamicity which can arise through poor practices. Successive language based attempts to attain a higher level of abstraction in the notations used and techniques deployed have resulted in the re-discovery of Domain Specific Languages (DSL). This paper looks at injecting the dynamicity required in the management of service groups through a policy based DSL