Abstract
Sensory environments for healthcare are commonplace nowadays. A patient monitoring system in such an environment deals with sensor data capture, transmission and processing in order to provide on-the-spot support for monitoring the vulnerable and critical patients. A fault in such a system can be hazardous on the health of the patient. Therefore, such a system must be dependable and ensure reliability, fault-tolerance, safety and other critical aspects, in order to deploy it in real scenario. Also, the management of the infrastructure resources must be efficient and the eventual system reconfiguration must be reliably performed. This paper encounters some of these issues and proposes a component platform with specific support for several QoS aspects, namely fault tolerance, safe inter-component communication and resource management. The platform adopts the Service Component Architecture (SCA) model and defines a Data Distribution Service (DDS) binding, which provides the fault tolerance and the required safety-ensuring techniques and measures, as defined in the IEC 61784-3-3 standard. As a proof of concept, a distributed home care application that improves the medical assistance in case of fire detection is presented.