Situation-Aware Ambient Assisted Living and Ambient Intelligence Data Integration for Efficient Eldercare - E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications - page 335

The iResidence TM system supports the integra-
tion of various devices and healthcare providers.
It offers high scalability, which is necessary for
use cases, where near real-time data processing
is mandatory or a high amount of data must be
processed. iResidence TM can scale from a more
or less trivial system, which only discovers sudden
falls in a one person household, to a system for
nursing or retirement homes where different types
of environmental or physiological data need to
be processed. To ensure privacy, basic security
mechanisms for encrypting data are available.
Figure 7 shows the basic architecture of iResi-
dence TM based on the afore mentioned require-
ments. Since an AAL system relies fundamentally
on measurements from sensors and devices, an
abstract interface is used to integrate (ii) wireless
sensor networks, (ii) medical devices, and (iii)
home automation systems from different vendors.
iResidence TM supports different wireless medical
devices for measuring blood pressure, blood sugar
and weight. Additional it is planned to integrate a
specifically designed bed (Schrempf & Schoßleit-
ner, 2010) to measure nightly activities, body
weight and other vital information.

A key component of the iResidence TM system
is the device mapper , which shields the internal
architecture from vendor specification designs by
transforming external data representations to
internal ones. The integration of new sensor de-
vices (wired or wireless) is done in the device
mapper's implementation which serves as a hub
as described in (Kurschl & Beer, 2009). This al-
lows the integration and use of non-standardized
and standardized devices, e.g. those following the
Continua Health Alliance (Continua Health Alli-
ance, 2010) standard for medical devices. The
same principle is used for integrating actuators
on the service level, which allows sending com-
mands to external devices (turn a power switch
on/off). iResidence TM supports USB connections,
wireless connections using ZigBee/ IEEE 802.15.4
(ZigBee Alliance Board of Directors, 2008) and
ANT (ANT - wireless networking protocol, 2010).
The iResidence TM core component is based on
the pipe-and-filter architecture pattern (see Figure
7 ). A pipeline or filter chain consists of one or
multiple filters, which process incoming data.
Filters can be used to check for a specific value and
keep data in the pipeline for further processing by
subsequent filters. A dispatcher is responsible for

Figure 7. Basic Architecture of iResidence TM