A Secure Ubiquitous Healthcare System Based on IMS and the HL7 Standards

摘要

Body sensors are small devices close or attached to the human body that gather information regarding vital signs (e.g. body temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat rate etc.) or other physiological data. The Health Level Seven (HL7) has published the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) which is a document markup standard that specifies the structure and semantics of a clinical document. CDA documents are encoded in Extensible Markup Language (XML) and are used for exchanging documents in heterogeneous environments. In this paper we are introducing an architecture to enable the collection of medical data in real time from body sensors, with the use of a hand held device (e.g. PDA) and their secure transmition to a central party, essentially a hospital, from where medical personnel will be able to access it, and assess the patients health status. When it comes to exchanging critical medical information the need for QoS (Quality of Service) is imperative. The IP (Internet Protocol) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) can be used to provide Internet services (including realtime multimedia services) with QoS, and integrate different services as well. The data gathered by the sensors are transmitted to the PDA. They are converted to CDA format, digitally signed, encrypted and then transmitted over IMS to the hospital from where data can be accessed by doctors using their own PDAs'.