Providing advanced remote medical treatment services through pervasive environments

Advances on sensor technology, wireless environments and data mining introduce new possibilities in the healthcare sector, realizing the anytime-anywhere access to medical information. Towards this direction, integration of packet-switched networks and sensor devices can be effective in deploying assistive environments, such as home monitoring for elderly or patients. In this paper we describe a policy-based architecture that utilizes wireless sensor devices, advanced network topologies and software agents to enable remote monitoring of patients and elderly people; through the aforementioned technologies we achieve continuous monitoring of a patient's condition and we can proceed when necessary with proper actions. We also present a software framework and network architecture that realizes the provision of remote medical services, in compliance with the imposed security and privacy requirements. A proof of concept prototype is also deployed, along with an evaluation of the overall architecture's performance.