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2015/02/23
 
23 Feb, 2015 | 3 min read

Guest Blog: Speeding Delivery of Affordable E-Health With WSO2

  • Hasmin AbdulCader
  • VP, Marketing - WSO2

The good news is that modern technology is helping us to live longer. According to the Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme, some 25% of the population in the European Union will be over 65 by the year 2020, and the number of people aged 65 to 80 years will rise by 40% between 2010 and 2030.

The challenge before us is to ensure that as people age, we can enable them to live independently and experience the highest quality of life possible—and do so in a way that is affordable for individuals and governments. Addressing that demand has been a key priority here in the Active Independent Living (AIL) group within Barcelona Digital Technology Center (BDigital).

We have built eKauri, a non-invasive e-health and smart home platform that empowers seniors to gain autonomy, participate in modern society, and achieve independence through solutions based on information and communications technologies (ICT). It includes a patient application that provides a range of services activated by the users—for example a home media center and video conferencing—plus sensors that monitor the patient’s activities and environment. A second care center module gives caregivers and managers tools for such activities as monitoring and managing patients and handling patient alarms, among many others.

The cloud-enabled eKauri platform takes advantage of credit-card sized Raspberry Pi computers and Z-Wave wireless home automation devices within patients’ homes. It also relies on four products from the open source WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform: WSO2 API Manager, WSO2 Identity Server, WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus and WSO2 Application Server. Together, these products enable eKauri to tie together data, applications and services across a range of applications, computers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Notably, all WSO2 products extend from its Carbon base, so it created a seamless environment that allowed for our programmers to rapidly gain an understanding of the technology as well as accelerate our integration and product development.

Because our charter is to develop technology that commercial partners can then deliver as solutions to the market, we wanted to provide a minimally viable version that our commercial partners could start using by January 2015. By speeding our development with WSO2, we were able to complete the first minimally viable version of eKauri in October 2014, three months ahead of schedule, and we already have a built-in market and clients that want to pay for the product.

With a rapidly aging population worldwide, we need to move quickly to bring new solutions to market that enhance the health and quality of life for senior citizens. WSO2 has played an important role in helping us meet that demand with eKauri.

WSO2 recently published a case study about our use of its products with eKauri. You can read it here.

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