Resilient Healthcare Communications using Delay Tolerant Proxy Services

There is an evident shift today towards integrated care where the single doctor-patient relationship needs to be evolved enabling the geographically extension of healthcare well beyond the boundaries of traditional hospital care systems. To achieve this, we need to shift the current model of telecommunication networks to a paradigm where they are able to serve as a resilient transport mechanism among or between medical things and services and people allowing the unconstructive and continue transmission of information for the delivery of high quality of care in various application domains (home/ remotecare, emergency, public-health, pandemics, etc.). In this paper we present a resilient networking system, designed to support unobstructive operation of critical eHealth/mHealth services where the end-to-end homogeneous networking connectivity might not possible or applicable. We focus on delivering the conceptual principles for the implementation of a delay tolerant prototype set of proxy like services, adapted for emerging telecommunication Health-ICT converging networks to be used in practice. We present our efforts towards integrating our system with a real-life patient empowerment eHealth application in order to extent service applicability of resilient remote health monitoring.