Performance evaluation of a generic driver for medical Bluetooth sensors

Outpatient nursing services expend a vast amount of time for manual documentation and management of patient basic claims data. Context-driven acquisition of sensor data, documentation of observations and their automated processing can reduce this time, while availability of documented information increases. Usage of wireless sensors is a major element of long-term measurement of medical data. Currently a technical experienced nurse, patient or an additional technical service provider is needed on site to configure new sensors and connect them with the patient's or nurse's monitoring device. To ease configuration and maintenance this paper proposes a technique for remote configuration of a sensor gateway and secure automated pairing with Bluetooth sensors. This paper presents a generic sensor driver that is interpreting XML-based protocol specifications to execute the protocol, thus avoiding the installation of additional sensor drivers in the operating system for each new sensor. It evaluates its performance compared to a binary driver. The concept is proven by an evaluation of the implementation.