An Adaptive Middleware Applied to the Ad-hoc Nature of Cardiac Health Care

Heart disease is the number one killer in the civilized world, accounting for around 1.9 million people every year in the EU, with the associated annual health costs of approximately EUR 105 billion. Important aspects of treating cardiac problems are monitoring and directing critical data to key individuals. The middleware proposed in this paper interacts with ECG sensors and provides a dynamic decision making framework for forming critical decisions when defined thresholds are exceeded. The middleware and its defined services target the embedded device domain which has an existing large scale deployment within the healthcare sector. The services help to ease development and address problems like dynamic grouping, load balancing and providing a uniform level of abstraction from the underlying network.