Analysis and framework-based design of a fault-tolerant web information system for m-health

The e-health domain has the objective to assist and manage citizens’ health. It concerns many actors like patient, doctors, hospitals and administration. Current and forthcoming generations of application will be web based and will integrate more and more mobile devices. In such application domain, called m-health, dependability is a key notion. In addition, more and more functionalities of such systems will be implemented as services for providing qualities like adaptability and maintainability. This paper presents, through a case study, how we can analyse and design an application that controls the insulin injection and that is embedded in a mobile device belonging to an e-health Web Information System (WIS). In order to ensure the dependability of the control systems, we show how to use Coordinated Atomic Actions (CAA). CAAs provide well defined concepts for fault tolerance, error-detection and error recovery in a distributed context where competitive and cooperative concurrencies are considered. The combination of CAA and SOA at design level it is proposed, with the purpose of being able to design systems that are partially implemented using service-oriented technologies. We updated and used our implementation framework, called CAA-DRIP, which originally was not tailored for service-oriented mobile applications. Thus, in this paper, we also propose an adaptation of CAA-DRIP for mobile devices.