Semantic interoperability of ambient intelligent medical devices and e-health systems

State-of-the-art mobile medical devices provide important therapeutic functions with valuable information of treatment patterns at the point-of-care. However, such devices mostly remain independent islands of information being unable to share the medical data they gather with other medical devices, hospital information system or laboratory information system on a real-time basis. Standards organizations such as IEEE have made various attempts to resolve the medical devices’ interoperability problem using single communication standard, such as IEEE 1073, but ended with moderate success. During the last years, the Semantic Web and Web Service technologies have gained enormous attention for building solutions to provide semantic interoperability between information systems and smart devices in various domains, such as tourism and factory automation. This thesis takes advantage of these technologies and presents a decentralized semantic middleware infrastructure for medical devices, named Semantic Medical Devices Space (SMDS) to provide interoperability among medical devices as well as with e-Health systems. The SMDS framework leverages the current medical devices towards the next generation of Ambient Intelligent Medical Devices, which are not only aware of other medical devices and their services present in healthcare environments, but also able to share their measurement results through Semantic Web Services in context-aware healthcare applications.