Service Realization and Composition Issues in the Homecare Domain

Most of the industrialized countries are facing a new situation which is the increasing number of elderly people and the enormous cost of associated healthcare. IT-based homecare services have been proposed as a solution to alleviate this problem. However, the adoption of the homecare services is hindered by the fact that there are many heterogeneous IT solutions, which prevent interoperability and integration of existing as well as future applications. Service-Oriented Architecture and its advantage of service composition in a loosely- coupled manner are being considered as a promising approach to promote interoperability. In this paper, we explain our motivation for and understanding of a generic service-oriented homecare platform. We consider the SOA paradigm and its idea of logical separation of concerns to define a service realization and composition framework and to identify its challenges in order to realize and compose the homecare services. Using our framework, we evaluate three academic homecare projects to see how they address the identified challenges. The work presented in this paper helps researchers to understand the state-of-the-art of homecare-related platforms and technologies; and to outline issues for further research in the homecare domain.