21-07-2012, 01:40 PM
Intelligent Mobile Health Monitoring System (IMHMS)
Intelligent Mobile Health Monitoring.pdf (Size: 526.02 KB / Downloads: 105)
Introduction
Pervasive computing is the concept that incorporates computation in our working and
living environment in such a way so that the interaction between human and computational
devices such as mobile devices or computers becomes extremely natural and the user can get
multiple types of data in a totally transparent manner [1]. The potential for pervasive
computing is evident in almost every aspect of our lives including the hospital, emergency
and critical situations, industry, education, or the hostile battlefield. The use of this
technology in the field of health and wellness is known as pervasive health care. Mobile
computing describes a new class of mobile computing devices which are becoming
omnipresent in everyday life. Handhelds, phones and manifold embedded systems make
information access easily available for everyone from anywhere at any time. We termed the
integration of mobile computing to pervasive health care as mobile health care. The goal of
mobile health care is to provide health care services to anyone at anytime, overcoming the
constraints of place, time and character.
Related Works
All Several health care projects are in full swing in different universities and
institutions, with the objective of providing more and more assistance to the elderly.
CAST (Center for Aging Services Technologies) [4] is organizing multiple projects
including: 1. a safe home that will help debilitated elderly by tracking their activities. 2.
a sensor-based bed to track the sleep and weight, which will later be used in detecting
diseases. In The Center for Future Health [5], a five-room house has been implanted
with several infrared sensors, monitoring devices and bio-sensors. The ultimate goal of
the project is to provide a unified solution for the seniors in the home, enabling them to
closely participate in disease detection and health management by themselves. A similar
type of project named AHRI (Aware Home Research Initiative) [6] is going on at
GeorgiaTech University. MobiHealth project [7] [8] [9] is going on to build a system
for collecting vital body signals and manipulating those in distant health care institutes.
The Terva [12] monitoring system had been introduced to collect data related to health
condition like blood pressure, temperature, sleep conditions, weight, etc., over quite a
long time. Here data has been collected four times a day (morning, noon, evening and
night) and saved in the form a TOD ( time-of-day) matrix and analyzed later.
System Architecture
IMHMS collects patient's physiological data through the bio-sensors. The data is
aggregated in the sensor network and a summary of the collected data is transmitted to a
patient's personal computer or cell phone/PDA. These devices forward data to the medical
server for analysis. After the data is analyzed, the medical server provides feedback to the
patient's personal computer or cell phone/PDA. The patients can take necessary actions
depending on the feedback. The IMHMS contains three components.
Wearable Body Sensor Network [WBSN]
Wearable Body Sensor Network is formed with the wearable or implantable bio-sensors in
patient's body. These sensors collect necessary readings from patient's body. For each organ
there will be a group of sensors which will send their readings to the group leader. The group
leaders can communicate with each others. They send the aggregated information to the
central controller. The central controller is responsible for transmitting patient's data to the
personal computer or cell phone/PDA. [16] suggested that for wireless communication inside
the human body, the tissue medium acts as a channel through which the information is sent as
electromagnetic (EM) radio frequency (RF). So in WBSN, information is transmitted as
electromagnetic (EM) radio frequency (RF) waves. The central controller of the WBSN
communicates with the Patients Personal Home Server [PPHS] using any of the three wireless
protocols: Bluetooth, WLAN (802.11) or ZigBee. Bluetooth can be used for short range
distances between the central controller and PPHS.
Intelligent Medical Server [IMS]
Intelligent Medical Server [IMS] receives data from all the PPHS. It is the backbone of this
entire architecture. It is capable of learning patient specific thresholds. It can learn from
previous treatment records of a patient. Whenever a doctor or specialist examines a patient,
the examination and treatment results are stored in the central database. IMS mines these data
by using state-of-the-art data mining techniques such as neural nets, association rules,
decision trees depending on the nature and distribution of the data. After processing the
information it provides feedback to the PPHS or informs medical authority in critical
situations. PPHS displays the feedback to the patients. Medical authority can take necessary
measures. The IMS keeps patient specific records.