Designing a Testing Environment for the CAPABLE Telemonitoring and Coaching Platform

The CAPABLE project has been funded by the European Union to develop a telemonitoring and coaching platform improving the quality of life for cancer patients. The platform, based on a multi agent blackboard architecture, is classified as a medical device according to the current EU regulation. Thus it needs extensive tests before being put into service for the planned clinical trials, which calls for a dedicated simulating and testing environment. Materials and Methods: Coordination in CAPABLE is achieved through the Case Manager, a component able to generate and notify events to other interested agent components. For representing and exchanging health care information we have adopted HL7 FHIR as a semantic interoperability standard. Results: FHIR has been exploited to design a structured history of a real patient affected by renal cell carcinoma. A simulator has been developed for automating the whole testing process represented by specific scenarios of the patient’s history. Conclusions: The simulator relies on the events produced by the Case Manager for coordinating the agents. This proved to be effective in checking that the agents reactions to new data showing up on the blackboard comply with the expected behavior.