Towards Proactive Context-Aware Service Selection in the Geographically Distributed Remote Patient Monitoring System

In the mobile (M)-health domain, the remote patient monitoring system (RPMS) facilitates continuous collection, transmission and viewing of the patient vital signs data. Furthermore, in case of an emergency it provides context-aware emergency response services (ERSs) such as the doctor, paramedic, ambulance and hospital to the patient. In the existing RPMS, the components responsible for the discovery and selection of ERSs are centralized; and the ERS are selected and invoked reactively; i.e. on the occurrence of an emergency. However, in the distributed RPMS, such reactive approach could take a significant amount of time. If ERSs could be discovered and selected proactively before an emergency occurs, it could save valuable time in dealing with the patient emergency. However, such proactive approach requires more resources as compared to the reactive approach. Herein we present a logical architecture for the distributed RPMS, investigate the issues involved in the proactive context-aware ERSs selection and the simulation methodology to analyze resource utilization and emergency response time tradeoff of the proactive vs. reactive approaches.