MORES: MORE Services

The MORES website dedicated for MORE Services, was launched during the first quarter of 2009. It makes available lots of information on the MORE middleware including complete documentation, tutorial videos, and software releases to the public. Feel free to browse www.services.ist-more.org for lots of information all around the MORE middleware.

How to develop a MORE service

In order to show the simplicity of service development on top of the MORE middleware we have created a short Flash Movie (about 4 min) which demonstrates the development of new services in Eclipse. It is based around our environmental monitoring application and illustrates how to implement a new basic measurement service which can be afterwards discovered by our GIS client.

MORE Prototype

During the Design Work Package of the MORE project a preliminary GUI prototype has been developed which targets the healthcare validation scenario. The prototype aims at continuous glucose measurements in order to allow for proactive and ongoing patient treatment.

The MORE middleware will offer an API for service developers and handles the communication between all participating devices. Further information on the architectural details of the MORE middleware can be found in the MORE tutorial. For the prototype five exemplary services have been implemented in Java: Medical Care, Process Measurement, Remote Management, Measurement Tracking, and Alarm Services. The purpose of this prototype is to illustrate the continuous glucose measurement use case. The services and their interaction are shown in the figure and briefly described in the following sections.

Medical Care & Process Measurement Service

The patient uses one device hosting both the Medical Care Service and the Process Measurement Service. For the development of the prototype the serial interface to the glucose sensor was replaced with the Medical Care Service (MCS) which serves as remote input for measurement values. The user keys in his/her glucose measurement values and clicks submit. The measurements are forwarded to the Process Measurement Service (PMS) running on a gumstix connex 400xm-bt, where they are verified regarding their criticality for the patient. If the measurement is in-line with the applied thresholds it is sent over a wireless link to the care personnel’s work station (see Measurement Tracking Service). In case the measurement exceeds the threshold of about 18.0 mmol/l, or the value falls below around 3.0 mmol/l, the measurement value is sent to both the care personnel’s work station and the doctor’s PDA or mobile phone.

Remote Management & Measurements Tracking Service

The care personnel run the Remote Management Service (RMS) and the Measurement Tracking Service (MTS) on their workstation in the office. The RMS allows them to access the services running on the gumstix remotely (RMS). The care personnel can start and stop services on the gumstix and are able to adjust the thresholds individually for indication of alarm situations or negative trends by utilizing the RMS. The MTS collects all received measurement values and displays them graphically in order to have chronological access to the patient’s measurement history.

Alarm Service

The doctor on duty has a PDA or mobile phone running the Alarm Service. The Process Measurement Service sends the values additionally to the Alarm Service on the doctor’s pda only in case of an emergency. The Alarm Service running on the PDA performs an audible alarm whenever a critical measurement is received and shows along with the concerned person, the time of the critical measurement and its value. This enables the doctor to react instantly on emergency situations but at the same time does not interfere with the doctor's daily workflow in case of regular measurements. For the developement of the prototype the Alarm Service was completed on a Linux-based HP iPAQ PDA running JamVM 1.4.5 as Java Virtual Machine.

Benefits

MORE allows chronic patients to be monitored continuously by sensors. Thus, the doctors and care workers know the status of their patients which enables them to take their patients’ individual needs into account. As a consequence thereof, not only the costs and the number of necessary personal encounters will be decreased but also the treatment itself will become more efficient.

MORE Tutorial

Users and developers who would like to gain a first insight into the MORE project are welcome to view the MORE tutorial (Flash presentation, ca. 3 MB, about 15 min). In the tutorial the architecture and services of the MORE middleware are not only described but also applied to two scenarios: Chronic Care - Health Monitoring and Mitigation Management. The tutorial also addresses various benefits that the implementation of MORE entails.