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Using Mashups to Satisfy Personalised Requirements in Telehealth
Ronan Fox, James Cooley, Manfred Hauswirth
Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway
firstname.lastname@deri.org
Abstract
In this paper, we describe the architecture of Sqwelch,
and show how it can be applied in the delivery of
healthcare to patients in the community and to support
their caregiver networks. We identify the challenges
associated with the delivery of telehealth solutions to
the patient in the community. Sqwelch is a mashup
maker available at www.sqwelch.com which enables
the creation of web applications by non-technical users.
1. Introduction
Currently, more than 90 million Americans suffer
from a chronic illness [1] and one in ten of the
population is 60 years old or more. By 2050 this
proportion will grow to one in five [2].
To address the healthcare problems facing our
society today, personalization and affordability of
health and wellness technologies is essential, as the
numbers of chronically ill and aged increases relative to
our underlying population. To relieve the burden on
healthcare delivery the technologies will be pushed out
of healthcare centers and into the home, where real-time
prevention, diagnosis, and treatment can occur.
2. Telehealth Challenges
Delivering telehealth services places a number of
challenges, both technical and commercial, on the key
stakeholders:
Differing, Complex Environments. Delivering
healthcare services to patients in the community
introduces complexity and heterogeneity in the target
environment. Processes must be put in place for
escalation in emergency situations, and the community
must be involved as members of caregiver networks
associated with each patient.
Distributed Collaboration. Enabling the patient to
self-manage a chronic illness requires the support of a
distributed team of specialists, physicians, pharmacists,
and casual caregivers forming the caregiver network.
Of course, the members of the caregiver network will
be geographically distributed but yet will need to
collaborate.
Personalized Requirements. Each member of the
caregiver network, including the patient, will have
requirements unique to their own environment,
capability, and level of responsibility.
Cost Sensitivity. The challenge here is to provide
healthcare services in a way which can be afforded by
providers and payers alike. Telemedicine solutions are
invariably closed-loop and proprietary resulting in high
costs of deployment and maintenance.
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3. Architecture
As noted in [3] mashups are about simplicity,
usability, and ease of access which can be provided
through a component model at the presentation layer to
maximize reuse. Middleware is required to loosely
couple resources together in mashups, and mechanisms
are required to enable integration across layers in the
application stack.
Figure 1 illustrates some of the technology choices
taken in the development of the Sqwelch platform.
Composition Services
Django Applications
Infrastructure Services
SQWELCH
Pinax / JQuery
Widget Widget Widget
Registration Voting Comments
Widget
Trust
Semantic
Mediation
Taxonomies
RDB
Datastore
Hosting Services
Hosting
Webpage
Trusted
Social
Networks
Widget
Search
Widget
Payload
Routing
Admin
Console
Widget 1 Widget 2
Figure 1 - Sqwelch Architecture
Sqwelch acts as a component registry which stores
metadata about the resources while they remain hosted
at distributed locations on the internet. Discovery is
enabled through search routines which rank the results,
through the use of catalogue features users will be
familiar with such as “Most Popular”, “Latest Upload”,
“Search”, along with Compatible Search which uses
descriptions of the APIs to find other resource with
which it could interact.
8. References
1. Borger, C., et al., Health Spending Projections
Through 2015: Changes On The Horizon. Health
Affairs, 2006. 25(2): p. W61-W73.
2. UN, Long-range World Population Projections:
Based on the 1998 Revision. 1999, Department of
Economic and Social Affairs - Population Division.
United Nations: New York. p. ESA/P/WP.
3. Yu, J., et al., Understanding Mashup Development.
IEEE Internet Computing, 2008. 12(5): p. 44-52.