Context-Aware Task Redistribution for Enhanced M-health Application Performance

Building context-aware mobile healthcare systems have become increasingly important with the emergence of new medical sensor technologies, the fast adoption of advanced mobile systems, and improved quality of care required by today’s patients. A unique feature of our mobile healthcare system is a distributed processing paradigm whereby a set of bio-signal processing tasks is spread across a heterogeneous network. As well as applying the traditional adaptation methods such as protocol adaptation and data prioritization, the authors investigate the possibility of adaptation based on dynamic task redistribution. In this chapter, the authors propose an adaptation middleware that consists of a task assignment decision mechanism and a task redistribution infrastructure. The decision mechanism represents task assignment as a graph mapping problem and searches for the optimal assignment given the latest context information. Once a new assignment is identified, the member tasks are distributed accordingly by the distribution infrastructure. A prototype implementation based on the OSGi framework is reported to validate the task redistribution infrastructure.