Jane W.-S. Liu

Wedjat: A Mobile Phone Based Medicine In-take Reminder and Monitor

Out-patient medication administration has been identified as the most error-prone procedure in modern health¬care. Under or over doses due to erratic in-takes, drug-drug or drug-food interactions caused by un-reconciled prescriptions and the absence of in-take enforcement and monitoring mechanisms have caused medication errors to become the common cases of all medical errors. Most medication administration errors were made when patients bought different prescribed and over-the-counter medicines from several drug stores and use them at home without little or no guidance. Elderly or chronically ill patients are particularly susceptible to these mistakes. In this paper, we introduce Wedjat, a smart phone application designed to help patients avoiding these mistakes. Wedjat can remind its users to take the correct medicines on time and record the in-take schedules for later review by healthcare professionals. Wedjat has two distinguished features: (1) it can alert the patients about potential drug-drug/drug-food interactions and plan a proper in-take schedule to avoid these interactions; (2) it can revise the in-take schedule automatically when a dose was missed. In both cases, the software always tries to produce the simplest schedule with least number of in-takes. Wedjat is equipped with user friendly interfaces to help its users to recognize the proper medicines and obtain the correct instructions of taking these drugs. It can maintain the medicine in-take records on board, synchronize them with a data¬base on a host machine or upload them onto a Personal Heath Record (PHR) system. A proof-of-concept prototype of Wedjat has been implemented on Window Mobile platform and will be migrated onto Android for Google Phones. This paper introduces the system concept and design principles of Wedjat with emphasis on its medication scheduling algorithms and the modular implementation of mobile computing application.

Smart Medication Dispenser: Design, Architecture and Implementation

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of an automatic medication dispenser for users who take medications without close professional supervision. By relieving the user from the error-prone tasks of interpreting medication directions and administrating medications accordingly, the device can improve the rigor in compliance and prevent serious medication errors. By taking advantage of scheduling flexibility provided by medication directions, the device makes the users medication schedule easy to adhere and tolerant to tardiness whenever possible. The medication scheduler and dispenser controller do this work collaboratively in an action-oriented manner. An advantage of this design is that new functions can be added and existing ones removed or revised with little or no need to modify the dispenser control structure.

Compliance Enforcement of Temporal and Dosage Constraints

Medication dispensers treated in this paper are designed to help improve compliance by users who live at homes and take medications over long periods of time. The paper first presents an overview of medication specifications that define constraints for dispensers and dispenser components that administer medications as specified. When given a specification and constraints defined by it, the dispenser scheduler checks for consistency and feasibility of constraints and schedules medications to meet the constraints. Several basic algorithms needed for these purposes are described and evaluated

Cyberphysical Elements of Disaster-Prepared Smart Environments

Intelligent Guards against Disasters (iGaDs) could process and respond to alert and warning messages from responsible authorities and thus help in preparing to respond to disasters, but making such smart devices and systems dependable and affordable enough for pervasive use in future smart living environments will require strong standards.

APAMAT: A Prescription Algebra for Medication Authoring Tool

We describe here the prescription algebra and its implementation for medication authoring tools. The tools are parts of medication use process, which consists of prescription entry systems, medication authoring tool, medication scheduling specification, medication scheduler, and programmable pill dispenser. A medication authoring tool aids the pharmacists to collect and integrate prescriptions, to verify drug-drug interactions amongst prescriptions one took for the prescribed duration, and to generate the scheduling specifications for pill dispensers. We design a prescription algebra for medication authoring tool to correctly complete its work. We have implemented the platform-independent medication authoring tool using JAVA. The screen snapshot are shown in the paper.

Active Disaster Response System for a Smart Building

In recent years, major natural disasters have made it more challenging for us to protect human lives. Examples include the 2011 Japan Tohoku earthquake and Typhoon Morakot in 2009 in Taiwan. However, modern disaster warning systems cannot automatically respond efficiently and effectively to disasters. As a result, it is necessary to develop an automatic response system to prevent, diminish or eliminate the damages caused by disasters. In this paper, we develop an active emergency disaster system to automatically process standard warning messages, such as CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) messages. After receiving official warning messages of earthquakes, our system automatically shuts down natural gas lines in order to prevent buildings from fire and opens the building doors for easy evacuation. Our system also stops elevators when they reach the closest floor. In addition, our system can be applied to hospitals to tell surgeons to pause ongoing operations, or to supermarkets to inform consumers of the way to exit the building. According to our experiment results, the proposed system can avoid possible dangers and save human lives during major disasters.

Smart phone based medicine in-take scheduler, reminder and monitor

Out-patient medication administration was identified as the most error-prone procedure in modern healthcare. Most medication administration errors were made when patients ac-quired prescribed and over-the-counter medicines from several drug stores and use them at home without proper guidance. In this paper, we introduce Wedjat, a smart phone application that helps patients to avoid these mistakes. Wedjat can remind its users to take the correct medicines on time and keep an in-take record for later review by healthcare professionals. Wedjat has two distinguished features: (1) it can alert the patients about potential drug-drug/drug-food interactions and plan an in-take schedule that avoids these adverse interactions; (2) it can revise an in-take schedule automatically when a dose was missed. In both cases, the software always produces the simplest schedule with least number of in-takes. Wedjat works with the calendar application available on most smart phones to issue medicine and meal reminders. It also shows pictures of the medicine and pro-vides succinct in-take instructions. As a telemonitoring device, Wedjat can maintain medicine in-take records on board, syn-chronize them with a database on a host machine or upload them onto an electronic medical records (EMR) system. A prototype of Wedjat has been implemented on Window Mobile platform. This paper introduces the design concepts of Wedjat with emphasis on its medication scheduling and grouping algorithms.

iMAT: Intelligent medication administration tools

iMAT is a system of automatic medication dispensers and software tools. It is for people who take medications on long term basis at home to stay well and independent. The system helps its users to improve rigor in compliance by preventing misunderstanding of medication directions and making medication schedules more tolerant to tardiness and negligence. This paper presents an overview of the assumptions, models, architecture and implementation of the system.

A Framework for Fusion of Human Sensor and Physical Sensor Data

Many disaster warning and response systems can improve their surveillance coverage of the threatened area by supplementing in situ and remote physical sensor data with crowdsourced human sensor data captured and sent by people in the area. This paper presents fusion methods which enable a crowdsourcing enhanced system to use human sensor data and physical sensor data synergistically to improve its sensor coverage and the quality of its decisions. The methods are built on results of classical statistical detection and estimation theory and use value fusion and decision fusion of human sensor data and physical sensor data in a coherent way. They are the building blocks of a central fusion unit in a crowdsourcing support system for disaster surveillance and early warning applications.

Strategies For Crowdsourcing ForDisaster Situation Information

When existing surveillance sensors used by a disaster warning and response system cannot provide adequate data for situation assessment purposes, crowdsourcing information collection can be an effective solution: People armed with wireless devices and social network services can be used as mobile human sensors. Eye-witness reports from them can complement data from in-situ physical sensors and provide the system with more extensive and detailed sensor coverage. The crowdsourcing strategy used by the system can be random, relying solely on mobility of individuals for coverage of the threatened area; or crowddriven, with the system providing situation updates as feedbacks to aid the crowd; or system-driven with individuals moving in response to directives from the system. The relative merits of the strategies clearly depend on the disaster scenario and the characteristics of the crowd. This paper presents a general crowd model for characterizing individuals within a crowd and the crowd as a whole and an abstract mobility model of crowd movements in the threatened area. The models can be specialized to characterize different disaster scenarios and crowds and used in simulation of the crowdsourcing strategies for evaluation purposes. Data on relative performance of different strategies for two types of disasters were thus obtained.