STEPSTONE: An Intelligent Integration Architecture for Personal Tele-Health

Abstract

STEPSTONE is a joint industry-university project to create open source technology that would enable the scalable, "friction-free" integration of device-based healthcare solutions into enterprise systems using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Specifically, STEPSTONE defines a first proposal to a Service Oriented Device Architecture (SODA) framework, and provides for initial reference implementations. STEPSTONE also intends to encourage a broad community effort to further develop the framework and its implementations. In this paper, we present SODA, along with two implementation proposals of SODA's device integration. We demonstrate the ease by which SODA was used to develop an end-to-end personal healthcare monitoring system. We also demonstrate the ease by which the STEPSTONE system was extended by other participants - Washington State University - to include additional devices and end user interfaces. We show clearly how SODA and therefore SODA devices make integration almost automatic, replicable, and scalable. This allows telehealth system developers to focus their energy and attention on the system functionality and other important issues, such as usability, privacy, persuasion and outcome assessment studies.