The Implementation of a Tele-Homecare System with Service Oriented Architecture and HL7 Message Transmission Standard

Because of the continuously growing elderly population and annually declining birth rate, the population structure faces major changes, creating problems regarding medical care and healthcare. To address these problems, this study proposes a tele-homecare system that combines wireless sensors and transmission technologies to provide simple physiological data analysis and remote health management consultation services. This system collects measured data, including heart rate, blood oxygen level, blood pressure, and electrocardiograph results from various physiological measuring instruments using Bluetooth wireless technology to transmit and save these data via the Internet to a remote database. The tele-homecare platform is designed with Web architecture of Smarty modular and provides services to users of all levels. The health management interface of the personalized service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides real-time physiological monitoring and analysis of physiological parameters, allowing users to inquire about their health information using mobile devices or personal computers. This study anticipates that by using Health Level Seven (HL7) as the unified and standardized electronic medical record and Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the data conversion format to provide expandable and integrated medical information services on the Internet and exchange medical histories with other medical institutes, medical resources can be shared. The combination of this system and information from medical institutes allows the integration of the patients’ medical records with their daily physiological measurements. The integrated data can be used as a diagnosis reference for physicians, reducing the time required to modify prescriptions and enabling the nursing staff to fully understand the patients’ physiological conditions. This reduces burden on medical personnel and family members providing long-term care, and ultimately improve the quality of medical services and reduce costs.