Empath2: a flexible web and cloud-based home health care monitoring system

Home health care sensing systems are projected to streamline the efficiency of the practice of medicine by decreasing the costs of senior care and by providing preventative care to keep people out of hospitals and nursing homes. Many current sensing systems are not yet flexible enough to easily handle widely different medical applications. Empath2 provides a flexible three layer architecture that uses the Cloud and can easily be instantiated for different home health care applications. To demonstrate the flexibility of the architecture, Empath2 was instantiated for three widely different purposes. We present the design of Empath2 stressing properties that support flexibility and discuss its differences from other flexible home monitoring architectures. Evaluations for three sets of real home deployments (two of which with actual patients, and one with healthy people) are presented showing the short deployment times, short software development times, and its effectiveness for the applications at hand. Lessons learned are also presented.