AMUSE: autonomic management of ubiquitous e-Health systems

Future e‐Health systems will consist of low‐power on‐body wireless sensors attached to mobile users that interact with an ubiquitous computing environment to monitor the health and well being of patients in hospitals or at home. Patients or health practitioners have very little technical computing expertise so these systems need to be self‐configuring and self‐managing with little or no user input. More importantly, they should adapt autonomously to changes resulting from user activity, device failure, and the addition or loss of services. We propose the Self‐Managed Cell (SMC) as an architectural pattern for all such types of ubiquitous computing applications and use an e‐Health application in which on‐body sensors are used to monitor a patient living in their home as an exemplar. We describe the services comprising the SMC and discuss cross‐SMC interactions as well as the composition of SMCs into larger structures. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.