Dependable Services for Mobile Health Monitoring Systems

The design and realization of health monitoring systems has attracted the interest of large communities both from industry and academia. Remote and continuous monitoring of patient’s vital signs is the target of an emerging business market that aims both to improve the quality of life of patients and to reduce costs of national healthcare services. Such applications, however, are particularly critical from the point of view of dependability. This presents the design of a set of services for the assurance of high degrees of dependability to generic mobile health monitoring systems. The design is based on the results of a detailed failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), conducted to identify the typical dependability threats of health monitoring systems. The FMEA allowed the authors to conceive a set of configurable monitoring services, enriching the system with the ability to detect failures at runtime, and enabling the realization of dependable services for future mobile health monitoring systems.