A Formal Approach for a Dependability Assessment of a mHealth Monitoring System

The implementation of mHealth monitoring systems is attracting increasing attention in academia and industry due to rising healthcare costs and the aging of the world population. However, the problem of failure detection and management in mHealth monitoring systems is becoming more and more critical and the use of wireless technologies and the adoption of commodity hardware/software platforms pose new challenges in terms of their correct functioning.Wireless channels can be affected by packet loss and cheap and wireless-enabled medical devices can exhibit wrong readings and temporary disconnections inducing medical staff to take wrong decisions.

In this chapter, we present an approach, relying on an event-based formalism, for the dependability assessment of mHealth monitoring systems. In particular, after a detailed failure modes and effects analysis, we identify some main critical events that could undermine the dependability of a Body Area Network (BAN) which is the most critical component of a mHealth monitoring system. Finally an application scenario concludes the chapter.