Adapting Medical Content to the Terminal Capabilities of Wireless Devices - E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications - page 291

Telemedicine, e-health, m-health (using mobile
devices), and other aspects of wireless medicine
are becoming state-of-the-art elements for the
most effective patient care. Mobile healthcare
covers everything from cellular phones to ambu-
lance-based telemedicine to home-based patient
monitors and implantable sensors. Technological
developments of wireless devices and systems
enable diagnoses to be made more rapidly and
at the point of care. They also allow physicians
and healthcare providers to connect remotely
with patients and caregivers. But no matter what
the device or technology, “m-health” is all about
opening up channels of communication among
healthcare professionals and patients to improve
people's health and wring some inefficiency from
the system (Neil Versel, 2010; Eric Topol 2009;
Louis Basenese 2010).
Hence, in the forthcoming wireless world
of E-healthcare systems, the concept of service
environment portability across network boundar-
ies and between terminals is emerging (3GPP TS
22.121). This essentially means that the medical
staff should be able to seamlessly access medi-
cal services with the same “look and feel”, while
roaming, and from a variety of terminals with
highly diverse capabilities (e.g., mobile phones,
smartphones, PDAs, laptop computers, PCs). In
that context, the knowledge of terminal capabili-
ties is essential for services provision, so users are
only offered customised services and content that
can be supported by the devices they currently use
for network access (Spyros Panagiotakis et al.,
2009). Practically this means that services may
need to be adapted to the terminal capabilities.
The challenge is how a mediating application
server detects the effective level of capabilities
of the requesting devices, so each client receives
the requested content in a form that its terminal
device can properly present (Spyros Panagiotakis
et al., 2006; Laakko T., Hiltunen T., 2005).
The present chapter focuses on the issue of
adaptation of medical services and content, in-

cluding multimedia, to the terminal capabilities
of the requesting device so with only one service
design all the possible client devices can be served.
Definitely it is neither practical nor fruitful to
implement different versions of a service for
each different device category. Hence, this certain
requirement should be fulfilled during service de-
velopment, since services should be implemented
in a generic way that will make them portable and
extendable to practically all of the terminals and
networks universally available, thus increasing
the potential profit from their development.
With respect to the state of the art, the stan-
dardized mechanism for terminal capabilities
negotiation is the one based on the W3C CC/
PP specification (CC/PP home page) for the an-
nouncement mechanism and the OMA UAProf
(UAProf specification) standard for the format
of capability data. Additionally, RDF (RDF home
page) is used to enable the interoperable encod-
ing of terminal profile metadata in XML (Elliotte
Rusty Harold, W. Scott Means, 2004) and the
extensibility of the data representation schema.
MPEG-21 (MPEG-21 home page) is another
similar standardized technology for context capa-
bilities exchange. In both standards, the terminal
capabilities data can embed in HTTP/1.1 headers
(IETF RFC 2616) and send to the provisioning
entity. Our contribution at first introduces to the
terminal capabilities adaptation issue and the as-
sociated technologies and fairly evaluates them.
Then it proposes a different approach to the CC/
PP and MPEG-21 proposal for the server-side
attempt to detect and understand the capabilities
of an attached wireless client device. In specific,
our proposal is a combination of the WURFL
(Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) repository
of device attributes (WURFL home page) with
a CGI technology (JAVA servlet) (Jason Hunter,
William Crawford, 2001), for dynamic adapta-
tion of the content that the server presents to the
clients, according to the associated client device's
capabilities.