David Peter Louis Simons

Continua: An Interoperable Personal Healthcare Ecosystem

The healthcare industry must improve its delivery methods and reduce costs to address current and anticipated needs. Various technologies could help by extending treatment and care beyond traditional clinical settings into personal and home settings. However, creating such a personal telehealth ecosystem will require interoperability. Device connectivity to enterprise services is currently very proprietary. In an effort to develop interoperability guidelines for the emerging personal telehealth ecosystem, we formed the Continua Health Alliance (www.continuaalliance.org), an international alliance of more than 133 companies. The guidelines will be based on a comprehensive set of industry standards, which will serve as a blueprint for integrating a product into the ecosystem.

Consumer Electronics Opportunities in Remote and Home Healthcare

This paper discusses opportunities in remote and home healthcare for the consumer electronics industry. First, trends, drivers, market segments and barriers to adoption are introduced. Next, the Continua Health Alliance is introduced, a consortium that aims at addressing these barriers, notably by defining an interoperability framework for remote and home healthcare systems, built on open industry standards. Finally, related opportunities to the CE industry are presented.

Towards Plug-and-Play Interoperability for Wireless Personal Telehealth Systems

This survey paper serves as an introduction to the challenges and needs related to wireless personal telehealth systems and provides an overview of ongoing activities in industry and various communication standards, aiming to enable plug-and-play interoperability. Specifically, we address a recently founded industry consortium, the Continua Health Alliance, and ongoing standardization efforts within the family of ISO 11073/IEEE 1073 standards, the Bluetooth SIG, and the ZigBee Alliance.

Mechanical verification of the IEEE 1394a Root Contention Protocol using Uppaal2k

Abstract.This paper reports on the mechanical verification of the IEEE 1394 root contention protocol. This is an industrial leader election protocol, in which timing parameters play an essential role. A manual verification of this protocol using I/O automata has been published in [24]. We improve the communication model presented in that paper. Using the Uppaal2k tool, we investigate the timing constraints on the parameters which are necessary and sufficient for correct protocol operation: by analyzing large numbers of protocol instances with different parameter values, we derive the required timing constraints. We explore the use of model checking in combination with stepwise abstraction. That is, we show that the implementation automaton correctly implements the specification via several intermediate automata, using Uppaal to prove the trace inclusion in each step.