Development of Generic Communication Middleware for Embedded Sensor Systems Transmitting Health Parameters

Sammanfattning: Health technology or e-Health is one of the most rapidly growing areas in healthcare today and it has been an important requirement as a new concept of healthcare industry. Since global society has been changed to aging society and the healthcare cost has been increasing in the 21st century since 2007. As the total number of people aged 65 or older is expected to increase from 12% to 22% in 2050 which is double the rate, and at the same time there is a decrease in in-fertility rates and increase in life expectancy due to the increase in life quality, there is a need to investigate the needs and requirements of an intelligent embedded sensor systems in health applications, and to develop a new communication protocol or set of protocols that can be used to send data collected from a hub within a house, home-care or a complex and send it securely and reliably to a central database where the gathered data can be monitored by a medical professional to make decisions for further interventions. The employed communication protocol should also be able to securely transmit confidential parameters from the hospital network to a central server outside of the hospital network. The final protocol must be inline with the regulations of the EU. This thesis is done in collaboration with Tjeders AB, Stille AB, and Embedded Sensor Systems for Health Plus (ESS-H+) research profile at Mälardalen University. In this thesis, different communication protocols such as IPSec and TLS and algorithms such as AES and RSA are examined and based on the requirements provided by the companies certain of these protocols and algorithms will be used in the final implementation. Different performance metrics such as overhead, round trip delay and throughput will be measured for the chosen communication protocols and recommendations will be given on which of the protocols and algorithms needs to be used to obtain an optimized, secure and reliable network.