Technology Enablers for Context-Aware Healthcare Applications

The increasing availability of mobile devices and wireless networks, and the tendency for them to become ubiquitous in our dally lives, creates a favourable technological environment for the emergence of new, simple, and added-value applications for healthcare. This chapter focuses on how context and location can be used in innovative applications and how to use a set of solutions and technologies that enable the development of innovative context and location-aware solutions for healthcare area. It shows how a mobile phone can be used to compute the level of familiarity of the user with the surrounding environment and how the familiarity level can be used in a number of situations.

Modeling Spatiotemporal Developments in Spatial Health Systems

This chapter introduces spatial health systems, identifies fundamental properties of these systems, and details for specific applications the methods to be applied in order to show how problems are solved in this field. On the one hand, this chapter gives an overview of this area, on the other hand, it is written for those who are interested in designing spatial health systems. The result is that different spatial scales and purposes require different representations for describing the spatiotemporal change of objects, that is their spatiotemporal development, showing how fundamental purposes of spatial health systems are dealt with.

Towards Wearable Physiological Monitoring on a Mobile Phone

In this chapter, we present our experience in using mobile phones as a platform for real-time physiological monitoring and analysis. In particular, we describe in detail the TripleBeat system, a research prototype that assists runners in achieving predefined exercise goals via musical feedback, a glanceable interface for increased personal awareness and a virtual competition. We believe that systems like TripleBeat will play an important role in assisting users towards healthier and more active lifestyles.

Sensing of Vital Signs and Transmission Using Wireless Networks

People living with chronic medical conditions, or with conditions requiring short term monitoring, need regular and individualized care to maintain their normal lifestyles. Mobile healthcare is a solution for providing patients’ mobility while their health is being monitored. Existing studies show that mobile healthcare can bring significant economic savings, improve the quality of care, and consequently the patient’s quality of life. However, despite all progresses in advanced information and telecommunication technologies, there are still very few functioning commercial wireless mobile monitoring devices present on the market, which most work off-line, are not proper for m-health services and there are still many issues to be dealt with. This chapter deals with a comprehensive investigation of feasibility of wireless and cellular telecommunication technologies and services in a real-time m-health system. The chapter bases its investigation, results, discussion and argumentation on an already developed remote patient monitoring system by the author. The implemented m-health system has been evaluated and validated by a number of well defined tests and experiments. The designed and implemented system fulfils the requirements. The suggested system is reliable, functions with a clinically acceptable performance, and transfers medical data with a reasonable quality, even though the system was tested under totally uncontrolled circumstances during the patients’ daily activities. Both the patients and the involved healthcare personnel expressed their confidence in using it. It is concluded that the system is applicable in clinical setup, and might be generalized in clinical practice. Finally, the chapter suggests improvement approaches for more reliable, more secure, more user-friendly and higher performance of an m-health system in future.

Towards Easy-to-Use, Safe, and Secure Wireless Medical Body Sensor Networks

Wireless body sensor networks (BSNs) are an indispensable building stone for any pervasive healthcare system. Although suitable wireless technologies are available and standardization dedicated to BSN communication has been initiated, the authors identify key challenges in the areas of easy-of-use, safety, and security that hinder a quick adoption of BSNs. To address the identified issues they propose using body-coupled communication (BCC) for the automatic formation of BSNs and for user identification. They also present a lightweight mechanism that enables a transparent security setup for BSNs used in pervasive healthcare systems.

A Distributed Approach of a Clinical Decision Support System Based on Cooperation

The incorporation of computer engineering into medicine has meant significant improvements in the diagnosis-related tasks. This chapter presents an architecture for diagnosis support based on the collaboration among different diagnosis-support artificial entities and the physicians themselves; the authors try to imitate the clinical meetings in hospitals in which the members of a medical team share their opinions in order to analyze complicated diagnoses. A system that combines availability, cooperation and harmonization of all contributions in a diagnosis process will bring more confidence in healthcare for the physicians. They have tested the architecture proposed in two different diagnosis, melanoma, and urological dysfunctions.

Patient Monitoring in Diverse Environments

Recording of physiological vital signs in patients’ real-life environment could be especially useful in management of chronic disorders; for example for heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, anorexia nervosa, chronic pain, or severe obesity. Thus, monitoring patients in diverse environments, by a mobile health system, is one of the major benefits of this approach, however at the same time the demands and challenges for improving safety, security and integrity increase. Top priorities for patients under recovery of health and elderly under care are the feeling of being cared securely and safely in there home and its surroundings. Solving these issues will elevate users’ compliance and trust to mobile health services. Most research activities have been focused on achieving common platform for medical records, monitoring health status of the patients in a real-time manner, improving the concept of online diagnosis, developing or enhancing telemedicine solutions, which deals with remote delivery of health care services applying telecommunications, etc.This chapter intends to explore the issues and limitations concerning application of mobile health system in diverse environments, trying to emphasize the advantages and drawbacks, data security and integrity suggesting approaches for enhancements. These issues will be explored in successive subsections by introducing two studies which were undertaken by the author.

Monitoring Hospital Patients Using Ambient Displays

Hospital work is characterized by intense mobility, a frequent switching between tasks, and the need to collaborate and coordinate activities among specialists. These working conditions impose important demands on hospital staff, whose attention becomes a limited and important resource to administer. Nurses in particular, need to constantly monitor the status of patients in order to assess their condition, assist them and/or notify physicians or specialists. Given their work load, it is not rare for them to miss important events, such as a catheter being disconnected due to the patient movement or the need to change a urine bag that has been filled. Pervasive technologies by being able to continuously monitor patients could provide awareness of the patients’ health condition. This awareness must be subtle, expressive, and unobtrusive without intruding on hospital workers’ focal activity. In this chapter the authors explore the use of ambient displays to adequately monitor patient’s health status and promptly and opportunistically notify hospital workers of those changes. To show the feasibility and applicability of ambient displays in hospitals they designed and developed two ambient displays that can be used to provide awareness patients’ health status to hospital workers. The first display takes into account the mobility experienced by nurses during their work to supervise the activities of daily living (ADL) conducted by patients. The second display is a flower vase that notifies nurses the urine output of patients and the status of their urine bag.

Managing Mobile Healthcare Knowledge

Incorporating healthcare information systems into clinical settings has been shown to reduce medication errors and improve the quality of work in general by improving medical decision making and by saving time. This chapter aims to demonstrate that mobile healthcare information system may also help physicians to communicate and collaborate as well as learn and share their experiences within their work community. Physicians’ usage of a mobile system is analyzed through a knowledge management framework known as the 7C model. The data was collected through the Internet among all of the 352 users of the mobile system. The results indicate that frequent use of the system seemed to improve individual physicians’ knowledge work as well as the collective intelligence of a work community. The guide for acute care, evidence-based medicine guidelines and information related to drug interactions supported the knowledge creation to a large extent. As such, mobile healthcare information systems may be capable of supporting the different sub-processes of knowledge creation and the knowledge work of individual physicians, and through this also improving the collective intelligence of the work community. Overall, knowledge management seems to be a prominent approach for studying healthcare information systems and their impact on the work of physicians.

Personal Health Records Systems Go Mobile

This chapter provides an overview of mobile personal health record (MPHR) systems. A Mobile personal health record is an eclectic application through which patients can access, manage, and share their health information from a mobile device in a private, confidential, and secure environment. Personal health records have evolved over the past three decades from a small card or booklet with immunizations recorded into fully functional mobile accessible portals, and it is the PHR evolution outside of the secure healthcare environment that is causing some concerns regarding privacy. Specifically, the chapter reviews the extant literature on critical evaluative components to be considered when assessing MPHR systems.