Web Services to improve interoperability of home healthcare devices

Home healthcare can be divided into monitoring and assistance scenarios. In both scenarios, miscellaneous devices are applied for dedicated sensor or actuator functionalities. The requirements and assumptions for the different nodes split the devices in three different classes with particular characteristics concerning energy consumption, power supply, memory, computing power, and bandwidth. Nevertheless, the number of nodes and complexity of setups require new concepts like Service-oriented Architectures to solve arising problems. In this paper, the Devices Profile for Web Services is suggested as comprehensive middleware for all three device classes. Hence, Web services technologies, which are already applied in the internet and in automation industry, can avoid interoperability problems of sensors and actors in the domain of home healthcare also.