Alexandru Egner

Towards Interoperability of eHealth System Networked Components

The growing number of patients with chronic diseases, the ageing population world wide, the rapid increase in hospital costs and in the cost of care personnel as well as the achieving medical objectives “increase the patient quality of life and survival” face Europe with a huge challenge. One of the solutions for reaching these challenges in the future is the deployment of complex eHealth systems in supporting information exchange between patients and healthcare providers. The eHealth systems architecture consists out of a series of components that are to be connected to each other. All these components have to be interoperable in order to reach a fully operational eHealth system. The interoperability is very difficult to achieve considering that the majority of components are designed and developed by various stakeholders. The paper does a thoroughly analysis of the interoperability state of the art concerning eHealth components. The results of the analysis indicates that the design and implementation of eHealth systems started to move slower into the right direction but without strong government or cross-border institutional regulations the objectives of obtaining a fully integrated and interoperable healthcare information infrastructure system is not possible.

Managing secure authentication for standard mobile medical networks

IEEE recently announced the 11073 family of standards which govern the interoperability of mobile medical devices within the patient environment. However, the IEEE transferred the responsibility of implementing security solutions in future mobile health systems to the manufacturer. The paper proposes an enhancement to the ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 protocol with an identity management system based on biometric cancelable fingerprint measure. A novel method of generating biometric keys based on minutiae mapping from the feature space to local invariants calculated from the Voronoi polygons representation is also presented.

From HTML to 3DMMO – A Roadmap Full of Challenges

WWW is everywhere, embraced by humankind to share information and collaborate. The basic schema of hyperlinked web pages has evolved with revolutionary technologies, altogether with the devices used to access the web, but still carries on strong limitations. Virtual reality and 3D MMO, with their sheer power of representation and interaction, is seen by many as the future of human computer based interaction and collaboration and would, naturally, mix with the WWW model sooner or later. The complexity of the technology, from technical point of view but also with many interdisciplinary issues (medical, ethical, economical, socio-political etc.) would make this transition challenging and exciting. This paper classifies, identifies and proposes basic conceptual solution for these issues - of moving from interconnected web pages to interconnected 3D virtual spaces with massive number of interacting users.

Biometric identity management for standard mobile medical networks

The explosion of healthcare costs over the last decade has prompted the ICT industry to respond with solutions for reducing costs while improving healthcare quality. The ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards recently released is the first step towards interoperability of mobile medical devices used in patient environments. The standards do not, however, tackle security problems, such as identity management, or the secure exchange of medical data. This paper proposes an enhancement of the ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 protocol with an identity management system based on biometry. The paper describes a novel biometric-based authentication process, together with the biometric key generation algorithm. The proposed extension of the ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 is also presented.

Multi GPGPU Optimizations for 3D MMO Virtual Spaces

The constantly growing demand for 3D Massively Multiuser Online (MMO) virtual spaces has led to an increase of the load that current 3D MMO server architectures need to cope with in order to accommodate a large user base that interacts inside the virtual space at a given moment of time. The traditional methods that are employed to solve this computational challenge by the current 3D MMO server architectures have inherent drawbacks regarding scalability, reliability, redundancy, cost and the realism of the virtual world. In the last few years, the graphics hardware has evolved in a spectacular manner in terms of computing power and architectural design, switching from a “single-core” to current “many-core” architecture. In this paper we propose an innovative approach to tackle the heavy computational operations that are executed by the simulations of 3D MMO Virtual Spaces using Multi GPGPU (General Purpose programming on Graphical Processing Units).

Towards secure e-health interoperable personal networks

The ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards recently announced was established to ensure plug-and-play interoperability between medical devices within personal area networks. The new standards transfer the responsibility for implementing security solutions for the mobile health systems to the manufacturer. The paper proposes an enhancement of the current specification of ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 standard with a patient authentication and identity management procedure which functions on the basis of biometric technology. The proposed identification procedure works with biometric keys derived from fingerprint measurements. The use of biometrics gives patients greater confidence in the identity management system, and fosters the trust in using mobile medical devices on a larger scale. The test system, implemented using the Continua Health Alliance framework, proved that the proposed identity management solution is easily embeddable into the ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards.