Dynamic service synthesis and switching for medical IoT and ambient assisted living

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT), our surrounding will include a large variety of devices from different manufacturers. One of its promising branches, the medical IoT, will also be accompanied by heterogeneous smart-home infrastructures. However, the efficacy of a medical IoT application will depend on how well the surrounding smart devices collaborate with it to serve the individual needs of the users. Pre-programmed solutions lack flexibility to adapt to each need and environment, and fail to make full use of the capabilities of a set of smart devices. In this paper, we propose a concept based on the flexible and user-friendly synthesis and switching of services for medical IoT applications. The crux of the concept is to provide a methodology in which non-experts can dynamically define services based on their needs. We describe a potential scenario, discuss the associated challenges, and present preliminary results on the feasibility of this approach. Particularly, we focus on design aspects for realizing the concept and propose the use of interpreters on the smart devices as alternative solution. We show that such an approach is feasible in terms of implementation and energy consumption while still maintaining the full flexibility of the service synthesis.