Towards a reusable architecture for message exchange in pervasive healthcare

The main objective of this paper is to present a reusable architecture for message exchange in pervasive healthcare environments meant to be generally applicable to different applications in the healthcare domain. This architecture has been designed by integrating different concepts and technologies of ubiquitous computing, software agents, and openEHR archetypes, in order to provide interoperability between healthcare systems. The architecture was demonstrated and evaluated in controlled experiments that we conducted at three cardiology clinics, an analysis laboratory, and the cardiology sector of a hospital located in Marília (São Paulo, Brazil). Three applications were developed to evaluate this architecture, and the results showed that the architecture is suitable to facilitate the development of healthcare systems by offering generic and powerful message exchange capabilities. The reusable architecture speeds up the development of new applications, reducing the number of mistakes and the development time. The proposed architecture facilitates message exchanging between caregivers, contributing in this way to the development of pervasive healthcare systems that allow healthcare to be available anywhere, anytime, and to anyone.