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2017/11/29
 
29 Nov, 2017 | 3 min read

Bringing an Efficient Home Care Solution to Life with WSO2 Technology

  • Samudra Weerasinghe
  • Senior Lead Marketing Officer - WSO2

Senior citizens and disabled people—many in fragile health and requiring assistance—often have limited resources for managing their health and ensuring their security. Effective home care solutions allow such people to safely go about their day-to-day lives and enhances their quality of life. To aide home caregivers and patients, Raffaello Leschiera, a solution architect at Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, proposed a reference architecture for efficient home care using WSO2 technology at WSO2Con EU 2017.

Raffaello began by exploring the proposed reference architecture that connected and interfaced with all stakeholders, like the patient, his/her family and medical staff. Firstly, they need to collect data from medical devices in the patient’s home. Protocols like IEEE VU specifications are used and medical devices are mediated using Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards. Once collected, the data needs to be normalized and stored so it’s represented in the same way no matter which device it was collected from.

This data needs to run through analytics to monitor the patient’s health, process events and if needed, send notifications through various communication channels. Data integration channels using the HL7 standard protocol for health care is used to send this data to medical staff. The medical staff can then access it through web and mobile interfaces and an API gateway decouples all features from these user interfaces. And finally, the entire system needs to be synchronized and controlled by identity and access management to ensure security and privacy.

Raffaello noted that WSO2's comprehensive technology platform, particularly its integration and analytics capabilities, were the main reasons for picking WSO2 as their technology partner. The open source nature of the products was also a key deciding factor since Raffaello and his team work with many public administrators who prefer to adopt solutions that are completely open source. “WSO2 has a wide technology platform so you can find the right answer to every part of your problem,” said Rafaello. “And because all the products seamlessly integrate with each other it’s easy to focus on the domain problem rather than the technology problem,” he added.

To describe how WSO2 products were used for different tasks, Raffaello compared the home care solution to a football game:

  • Goalkeeper: WSO2 Microservices Framework for Java (WSO2 MSF4J) serves as the goalkeeper. This is the entire back-end of the system, which is based on lightweight microservices that are developed, deployed and monitored through MSF4J in a highly scalable and reliable manner with integrated security.
  • Defenders: WSO2 Data Analytics Server serves as one defender that receives data, analyzes it in real-time, and sends notifications. WSO2 Enterprise Integrator is the next defender who transforms disparate types of data into a normalized format and sends it to the hospital IT systems.
  • Forwards: WSO2 API Manager is one of the forwards, which faces the medical staff and is used to design, prototype and publish APIs and govern API usage. WSO2 IoT Server is another forward, which faces the medical devices for data collection, device management and protocol support.
  • Wings of the pitch: Here the WSO2 Identity Server takes care of all the strict security and privacy requirements.
  • Center of the pitch: Finally, WSO2 Governance Registry serves as the ‘Lionel Messi’ at the center of the pitch; in other words it governs the solution through surveillance just like how Messi would guide and lead his team to victory.
  • For this solution to work, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica needed a remote device that can track a patient’s movements within his/her home. Enter Joe Care (or the Joker pictured above). Joe Care is a remote presence device that is flexible and agile enough to move around the patient’s home. They used various technologies like Arduino boards, software that deals with movement and the sense of space as well handling (touch). It served as the medical eyes, ears, voice, and fingers within the patient’s home.

    In the future Rafaello and his team aim to engage with users more, further analyze threat paths and include more technology like wearables that monitor movement and exercise. They would also like to create more intelligent early warning score models and move their entire solution to the cloud so more patients and operators can access it.

    Watch Rafaello’s presentation at WSO2Con EU 2017 below to learn more about their home care solution powered by WSO2.
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