Towards a health software supporting platform for wearable devices

Abstract

The number of broadly available wearable devices like smart watches or fitness bands keeps growing, as well as their performance and number of provided features related to user's health. This was the reason for our decision to bring the SmartCGMS (Smart Continuous Glucose Monitoring and Controlling System) to a wearable device, in order to foster its way to practical deployment in healthcare. Currently, the SmartCGMS system is able to run on Windows, macOS, Linux, RaspberryPi or Android phones and tablets. What is currently hindering us to run SmartCGMS on a wearable device is the heterogeneity of devices and primarily lack of real-time OS features available to developers. This is natural, because device vendors aim for best user experience and so foreground tasks get the highest priority in order to maximize device responsiveness and suppress background tasks for minimum CPU load and battery drain. But running medical software on a wearable device requires almost the opposite – tasks reading sensor data and especially tasks controlling drug dosage, that are running on the wearable, require high priority and minimum interference with other running tasks. In this article, we present an initial design of a software framework in development, that will provide us the features we are currently missing in available wearable devices operating systems: a common application image that is able to run on various wearable devices and support for high priority tasks.