Body Sensor Network: A Self-Adaptive System Exemplar in the Healthcare Domain
This work addresses the need for flexible healthcare systems to handle unpredictable environments, though it appears incremental as a prototype implementation.
The authors tackled the challenge of creating adaptable healthcare monitoring systems by developing SA-BSN, a self-adaptive body sensor network prototype that balances system reliability and battery consumption, including features like noise injection and sensor simulations.
Recent worldwide events shed light on the need of human-centered systems engineering in the healthcare domain. These systems must be prepared to evolve quickly but safely, according to unpredicted environments and ever-changing pathogens that spread ruthlessly. Such scenarios suffocate hospitals' infrastructure and disable healthcare systems that are not prepared to deal with unpredicted environments without costly re-engineering. In the face of these challenges, we offer the SA-BSN -- Self-Adaptive Body Sensor Network -- prototype to explore the rather dynamic patient's health status monitoring. The exemplar is focused on self-adaptation and comes with scenarios that hinder an interplay between system reliability and battery consumption that is available after each execution. Also, we provide: (i) a noise injection mechanism, (ii) file-based patient profiles' configuration, (iii) six healthcare sensor simulations, and (iv) an extensible/reusable controller implementation for self-adaptation. The artifact is implemented in ROS (Robot Operating System), which embraces principles such as ease of use and relies on an active open source community support.