Bluetooth Low Energy Peripheral Android Health App for Educational and Interoperability Testing Purposes

Based on recent telemonitoring activities in Austria for enabling integrated health care, the communication interfaces between  personal health devices (e.g. blood pressure monitor) and personal health gateway devices (e.g. smartphone, routing received information to wide area networks) play an important role. In order to ease testing of the Bluetooth Low Energy interface functionality if the personal health gateway devices, a personal health device simulator was developed. Based on specifications from the  bluetooth SIG a XML software test configuration file structure is defined that declares the specific features of the personal health  devices simulated. Using this configuration file, different scenarios are defined, e.g. send a single measurement result from a blood pressure reading or sending multiple (historic) weight scale readings. The simulator is intended to be used for educational purposes  in lectures, where the number of physical personal health devices can be reduced and learning can be improved. It could be shown  that this simulator assists the development process of mHealth applications by reducing the time needed for development and  testing.