SMART

Patient monitoring is important in many contexts: at mass-casualty disaster sites, in improvised emergency wards, and in emergency room waiting areas. Given the positive history of use of monitoring systems in the hospital during surgery, in the recovery room, or in an intensive care unit, the authors sought to use recent technological advances to enable patient monitoring in more diverse circumstances: at home, while traveling, and in some less well-monitored areas of a hospital. This chapter presents the authors’ experiences in designing, implementing and deploying a wireless disaster management system prototype in a real hospital environment. In addition to a review of related systems, the sensors, algorithms and infrastructure used in our implementation are presented. Finally, general guidelines for ubiquitous methodologies and tools are shared based on the lessons learned from the actual implementation.

Nursing Home

A nursing home is an entity that provides skilled nursing care and rehabilitation services to people with illnesses, injuries or functional disabilities, but most facilities serve the elderly. There are various services that nursing homes provide for different residents’ needs, including daily necessity care, mentally disabled, and drug rehabilitation. The levels of care and the care quality provided by nursing homes have increased significantly over the past decade. The trend nowadays is the continuous quality development towards to residents’ satisfaction; therefore healthcare technology plays a significant role in nursing home operations. This chapter points out the general information about current nursing home conditions and functioning systems in the United States, which indicates the way that technology and e-health help improve the nursing home development based on the present needs and demanding trends. The authors’ also provide a visiting report about Thomasville Nursing Home with the depth of the consideration to how to catch the trends by implementing the technologies.

An Investigation Into The Use Of Pervasive Wireless Technologies To Support Diabetes Self-Care

Diabetes is one of the leading chronic diseases affecting Australians and its prevalence continues to rise. The goal of this study is to investigate the application of a pervasive technology solution developed by INET in the form of a wireless enabled mobile phone to facilitate superior diabetes self-care.

Designing Pervasive Healthcare Applications in the Home

The authors propose a new home health care system for the acquisition and transmission of data from ordinary home health care appliances, such as blood pressure monitors and weight balances. In this chapter, they briefly explain a standard protocol for data collection and a simple interface to accommodate different monitoring systems that make use of different data protocols. The system provides for one-way data transmission, thus saving power and extending to CCITT. Their standardized protocol was verified during a 1-year field test involving 20 households in Japan. Data transmission errors between home health care devices and the home gateway were 4.21/day with their newly developed standard protocol. Over a 1-year period, they collected and analyzed data from 241,000 separate sources associated with both healthy, home-based patients and chronically ill, clinic-based patients, the latter with physician intervention. They evaluated some possible applications for collecting daily health care data and introduce some of their findings, relating primarily to body weight and blood pressure monitoring for elderly subjects in their own homes.

Pervasive Networks and Ubiquitous Monitoring for Wellness Monitoring in Residential Aged Care

It is becoming more critical for developed countries to deliver long-term and financially sustainable healthcare services to an expanding ageing population, especially in the area of residential aged care. There is a general consensus that innovations in the area of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are key enabling technologies for reaching this goal. The major focus of this chapter is on WSN design considerations for ubiquitous wellness monitoring systems in residential aged care facilities. The major enabling technologies for building a pervasive WSN will be explored, including details on sensor design, wireless communication protocols and network topologies. Also examined are various data processing methods and knowledge management tools to support the collection of sensor data and their subsequent analysis for health assessment. Future systems that incorporate the two aspects of wellness monitoring, vital signs and activities of daily living (ADL) monitoring, will also be introduced.

Model-Driven Prototyping Support for Pervasive Healthcare Applications

Pervasive healthcare applications aim at improving habitability by assisting individuals in living autonomously. To achieve this goal, data on an individual’s behavior and his or her environment (often collected with wireless sensors) is interpreted by machine learning algorithms; their decision finally leads to the initiation of appropriate actions, e.g., turning on the light. Developers of pervasive healthcare applications therefore face complexity stemming, amongst others, from different types of environmental and vital parameters, heterogeneous sensor platforms, unreliable network connections, as well as from different programming languages. Moreover, developing such applications often includes extensive prototyping work to collect large amounts of training data to optimize the machine learning algorithms. In this chapter the authors present a model-driven prototyping approach for the development of pervasive healthcare applications to leverage the complexity incurred in developing prototypes and applications. They support the approach with a development environment that simplifies application development with graphical editors, code generators, and pre-defined components.

TUM-AgeTech

In this chapter, the program of the Technical University Munich regarding implementation of technologies for an aging society is introduced. Various departments from the faculties of both technology and medicine are working jointly to actualize a technological basis for the development of assistance devices. Industrialized countries such as Japan and Germany will be facing an extreme demographic shift over the next 15 years. More than half of the population will be over 50 years of age. Belief in technological progress – initiated by the innovations of computer and the Internet – harbors the risk that the time required for necessary technological advancements is being significantly underestimated. This chapter describes the motivation and the concept of hardware architecture for implementation of assistance devices and for integration of pre-existing (or concurrently developed) sensors and concepts.

Trustworthiness of Pervasive Healthcare Folders

During the last decade, many countries launched ambitious Electronic Health Record (EHR) programs with the objective to increase the quality of care while decreasing its cost. Pervasive healthcare aims itself at making healthcare information securely available anywhere and anytime, even in disconnected environments (e.g., at patient home). Current server-based EHR solutions badly tackle disconnected situations and fail in providing ultimate security guarantees for the patients. The solution proposed in this chapter capitalizes on a new hardware device combining a secure microcontroller (similar to a smart card chip) with a large external Flash memory on a USB key form factor. Embedding the patient folder as well as a database system and a web server in such a device gives the opportunity to manage securely a healthcare folder in complete autonomy. This chapter proposes also a new way of personalizing access control policies to meet patient’s privacy concerns with minimal assistance of practitioners. While both proposals are orthogonal, their integration in the same infrastructure allows building trustworthy pervasive healthcare folders.

Communication Issues in Pervasive Healthcare Systems and Applications

This book chapter provides a systematic analysis of the communication technologies used in healthcare and homecare, their applications and the utilization of the mobile technologies in the healthcare sector by using in addition case studies to highlight the successes and concerns of homecare projects. There are several software applications, appliances, and communication technologies emerging in the homecare arena, which can be combined in order to create a pervasive mobile health system. This study highlights the key areas of concern and describes various types of applications in terms of communications’ performance. A comprehensive overview of some of these homecare, healthcare applications and research are presented. The technologies regarding the provision of these systems are described and categorised in two main groups: synchronous and asynchronous communications’ systems and technologies. The recent advances in homecare using wireless body sensors and on/off-body networks technologies are discussed along with the provision of future trends for pervasive healthcare delivery. Finally, this book chapter ends with a brief discussion and concluding remarks in succession to the future trends.

Sensor Networks Security for Pervasive Healthcare

Body-worn sensors and wireless interconnection of distributed embedded devices facilitate the use of lightweight systems for monitoring vital health parameters like heart rate, respiration rate and blood pressure. Patients can simply wear monitoring systems without restricting their mobility and everyday life. This is particularly beneficial in the context of world’s ageing society with many people suffering chronic ailments. However, wireless transmission of sensitive patient data through distributed embedded devices presents several privacy and security implications. In this book chapter the authors’ first highlight the security threats in a biomedical sensor networks and identify the requirements that a security solution has to offer. Then the authors’ review some popular architectures proposed in the bibliography over the last few years and they discuss the methods that they employ in order to offer security. Finally the authors’ discuss some open research questions that have not been addressed so far and which they believe offer promising directions towards making these kinds of networks more secure.