Development of u-House Gateway for u-Healthcare
Dongwoo Ro, Sooyoung Yoo, Kyungwoo Cheon, Jinwook Choi · Journal of Korean Society of Medical Informatics · 2009
Objective: Ubiquitous healthcare (u-Healthcare) is an emerging paradigm in the healthcare environment.One of the most promising applications for u-Healthcare is the ubiquitous home health monitoring system.This paper addresses two significant challenges in the successful application of the ubiquitous home health monitoring system: the uniform integration of measured biosignal data and easy access to monitored biosignal data.Methods: We used the Medical waveform description Format Encoding Rule (MFER) standard to encode biosignal data.A web-based MFER upload ActiveX control was designed and implemented to transfer MFER files to the central repository server in a near real-time basis.All of the integrated biosignal data were then accessed and managed through the central repository server.Results: We developed a u-House server that can serve as a uniform data transferer to integrate measured biosignal data from u-House homes into the remote central repository server.We developed user-friendly web services that allow users to easily search and view monitored biosignal data.Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that the MFER standard can be easily adapted to u-Healthcare systems and that a web-based ubiquitous home health monitoring system has advantages of ubiquitous access and scalability.