AMUSE: Autonomic Management of Ubiquitous Systems for eHealth
Future e-Science and e-Health applications will involve mobile users, possibly with on-body sensors interacting with a ubiquitous computing environment which detects their activity, current context and adapts accordingly. However, the promise of such ubiquitous computing environments will not be realised unless these systems can effectively “disappear”; and for this they need to become autonomous by managing their own evolution and configuration changes without explicit user or administrator action. This project will develop the architecture, tools and techniques which permit these environments to become self-managing. To provide self-management at varying levels (for individual devices, for simple body-area or home-area networks, as well as large-scale network infrastructures) we advocate the concept of a self-managed cell (SMC) as the basic architectural pattern at both local and integrated levels. We will define, prototype and evaluate architectures based on the SMC pattern and their use in e-Health applications. To this end we will: define and implement the core SMC pattern in terms of the monitoring, service-discovery, context and policy-control services required for basic adaptation mechanisms, investigate how SMCs can be dynamically structured into larger structures and specialise SMCs and their interactions for two e-Health application scenarios.