Modular Interoperability for Healthcare Cyber-Physical Systems

The challenge of interoperability within Cyber-Physical Systems, is to extend interoperability notions developed for systems consisting of single set of sensors or services to cover large scale dynamic, mobile and distributed cyber-physical systems. Our vision is to create an interoperability framework that enables a service driven top-down design methodology that allows the placement of computations in nodes in the fog, based on non-functional requirements like size of the computation, amount of data processed, life-time of the data, etc. In this project we develop a lightweight, modular, energy efficient, and scalable framework, InterSys, to provide interoperability of various protocols, platforms, and data formats in the healthcare cyberphysical systems (Health-CPS). The key advantages of InterSys are modularity inspired by the concept of Network on Terminal Architecture (NoTA), self-awareness and scalability motivated by the Fog Computing model and the role of smart gateways in this model. We aim at providing a uniform class of open-source middleware for different components in Health-CPS including both resource-constrained devices (e.g., wearable and implantable sensors) as well as non-resource-constrained devices (e.g., smart gateways, smart beds), hence providing an interoperable and intelligent Fog computing environment, and transparent access to sensors from cloud.