Ericsson’s US office in Silicon Valley is cooperating with the local campus of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) on an IMS-based health care application for the Android platform.
Senior research engineers Martin Svensson and Kristoffer Gronowski are leading the collaboration, which is part of a curriculum project at CMU that started in January.
Four students spend two days a week at Ericsson’s Silicon Valley office working very closely with Svensson and Gronowski. The students use the Ericsson Mobile Java Communication Framework (MJCF), a set of IMS enablers available via the web. The server-side of MJCF builds on Sun Microsystems’ open-source application server project SailFin, which has its origin in Ericsson’s standards-based SIP Servlet 1.0 application server, donated to the GlassFish open-source community in 2007.
“The students concentrate on the application, and building on their input, we have put a lot of effort into improving MJCF,” Svensson says.
Fundamental to the course is building on open source. Gronowski explains: “It is important that the students learn that when working with open-source products, things are not always as well structured as one would like. You need to be creative and ready to find workarounds.”
The students started by building a larger scenario around the service Ericsson ordered, and now, using an agile methodology, they have completed a software application that partly fulfills that scenario. Two of the students will be hired as interns by Ericsson during their summer break this year, to continue working on the application.
The application, called IMSafe, is a health-care service, built for the Android platform, which is a completely open platform.
Among other services, IMSafe keeps track of a patient’s medical prescriptions, and can notify them on their mobile when they are close to a pharmacy where they have medicine to pick up. It notifies family and friends when the patient needs help, and so on.
The IMSafe application is a mash-up. IMS is just one part and is used for communication. “We encourage the students to write as little code as possible themselves, and use open source whenever possible, such as Google maps and medical databases,” Gronowski says.
Svensson and Gronowski are very pleased with the project – the outcome as well as the open-source spirit in which it has been run. They believe this type of collaboration is important to show that there are interesting application areas for IMS, and to make IMS functionality easily available for developers.
“Also, it is among the university students that we will find our future employees, as well as those of our customers and partners,” Svensson says. “So it is very important that they understand what Ericsson stands for, and what we can offer.”
By Benny Ritzén
