Florica Moldoveanu

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.

Human motion tracking & evaluation using Kinect V2 sensor

Microsoft Kinect V2 sensor is a motion sensing device that provides to the users a facility to interact with computers and game consoles through many ways like natural movement, gestures or spoken commands. This technology allowed many researchers and companies to develop real-time applications in various fields like healthcare, sports training, facial emotion detection, gaming, security, 3D reconstruction, motion recognition and many other. In this paper, we presented an approach to handle the problem of human body motion skeletal tracking with application in medical rehabilitation and sports training by using capabilities of the latest version of the Microsoft Kinect sensor.

Navigational 3D audio-based game-training towards rich auditory spatial representation of the environment

As the number of people suffering from visual impairments continuously increases, there is strong need for efficient sensory substitution devices, that can support creating a rich mental spatial depiction of the environment. The use of the auditory sense has proved to be an effective approach towards creating a method of interaction with the elements of the surrounding space in a way which resembles the natural 3D visual representation of normal sighted people. Training is an essential component in the process of employing an auditory-based visual substitution device for blind people, as it helps them to learn and become proficient to process and decode the audio information and convert it into spatial mental representation. Taking into account the well-known advantages of game based learning, we propose a new method of training, consisting in a navigational 3D audio-based game. In this exploratory, goal-directed application, the player has to perform route-navigational tasks under different conditions, with the purpose of training and testing their orientation and mobility skills, relying exclusively on the perception of 3D audio cues. Experimental results showed that this game-based learning strategy leads to substantial improvements and can be a starting point for developing more enhanced sound-based navigational applications. The ludic-oriented, motivational training approach achieved straightforward immersion and concentration on the cognitive depiction of the environment, ensuring behavioral gains in the sound-directed spatial orientation.

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.

3D Visualization in IT Systems Used for Post Stroke Recovery: Rehabilitation Based on Virtual Reality

In the last decade Virtual Reality proved to be an efficient alternative for the traditional rehabilitation method for stroke survivors, which is based mainly on kinesiotherapy. A high number of IT systems that are focusing on post stroke recovery are available at this moment. This paper contains a short description of two solutions available on the market followed by the technical details of a new idea. The solutions are analyzed, looking at their strong points, areas of improvement and common characteristics. The analysis is based not only on the design of the virtual environment and applicability in rehabilitation and is also based on the dependent libraries regarding their usability, scalability and extensibility. The principles behind the methods used for 3D visualization of the virtual reality environments, in neuromotor rehabilitation, can advance in design and implementation for creating effective solutions to help the post stroke survivors in their rehabilitation process.

GPU-SD and DPD parallelization for Gromacs tools for molecular dynamics simulations

This article presents the GPU parallelization of new algorithms SD and DPD types for molecular dynamics systems developed by the Molecular Dynamics Group, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. One should note that molecular dynamics simulations are time-consuming simulations of systems, running time ranging from days to weeks and months. Therefore parallelization is a key issue for the well-running and use of MD software. The paper presents the main ingredients of GPU parallelization of the new algorithms and simulation results. It can be concluded that the parallelization through the use of graphical cards improves the performances of the runs as compared to the serial version of the code.

Real-time hand hygiene monitoring system for HAI prevention

When healthy people such as visitors and medical staff members or resident patients get an infection from the hospital or from each other; this situation is identified as a Hospital Acquired Infection (HAI). HAI is a key issue of current hospitals; it requires high fiscal expenditure rate for combating the problem, and it causes high mortality rate and prolongs the time of treatment in hospitals. In this paper, we analyze the existing HAI prevention solutions, and then we describe in detail our own system for HAI prevention.

A formal analysis of ISO/IEEE P11073-20601 standard of medical device communication

This article presents the formal work done for the ISO/IEEE P11073-20601 Draft Standard for Health informatics - Personal health device communication - Application profile - Optimized exchange protocol. ISO/IEEE 11073 family defines standards for device communication between agents (e.g. blood pressure monitors, weighing scales) that collect information about a person and manager (e.g., cell phone, health appliance, or personal computer) for collection, display, and possible later re-transmission. The particular draft standard ISO/IEEE P11073-20601 defines protocols for data exchange between agents and managers. Although such a system in medical use must be extremely reliable under all circumstances, until now a formal analysis has been used only in analyzing draft IEEE P11073-20601 as a part of developing the protocols in this family of standards. We analyzed the protocols both manually and automatically. For the automated analysis of safety properties we applied model-checking techniques, which is feasible since the number of processes is limited, and because we can abstract from most data in the protocols. We used the language Promela and the tool Spin, since this combination has a good reputation in practical applications and it is well documented. The results of our work are now incorporated in this standard.

Position based simulation of solids with accurate contact handling

Abstract Simulating multi-body dynamics with both rigid and flexible parts and with frictional contacts is a hard problem. We solve this by expressing the couplings between the bodies as position level constraints. The implicit treatment of the constraint directions gives us improved stability over velocity based methods. Then by employing regularization of nonlinear constraints and a convex minimization formulation, we bridge constraint-based methods to traditional force-based methods. In fact, the former are just a dual variables formulation of the latter. We solve this dual problem using position based dynamics (PBD). We show how PBD is a completely valid modeling technique and we extend it with an accurate contact and Coulomb friction model. We further show for the first time how the same solver can be used to simulate both rigid and deformable solids with two way coupling. For the soft bodies we introduce a novel form of linear finite elements expressed as constraints, that is more accurate than PBD mass-spring systems. More of our results include the energy conserving Newmark integrator and the accelerated Jacobi solver suitable for parallel architectures. Note that this paper is an extended and revised version of the conference paper published in [1].

Navigational audio games: an effective approach toward improving spatial contextual learning for blind people

Abstract For people who suffer from a visual impairment, navigating in an unknown environment represents a considerable challenge. To help them develop spatial orientation and mobility skills, researchers have employed audio-based computer games as a practical, interactive and user-centered learning approach. The highly immersive and attractive nature of audio games enables blind people to create a spatial representation of their environment that can be assigned to aid performing real-life navigation tasks. This paper reviews the most notable navigational audio-based games in terms of their conceptual and technological approach, accessibility and user interaction efficiency.