Katarzyna Wac

Mobile patient monitoring: The MobiHealth system

The emergence of high bandwidth public wireless networks and miniaturized personal mobile devices give rise to new mobile healthcare services. To this end, the MobiHealth system provides highly customizable vital signs tele-monitoring and tele-treatment system based on a body area network (BAN) and a mobile health care (m-health) service platform utilizing next generation public wireless networks. The developed system allows the incorporation of diverse medical sensors via wireless connections, and the live transmission of the measured vital signs to healthcare providers as well as real-time feedback to the patient. Since 2002 the system has undergone substantial development in consecutive EU and national research projects. Diverse trials with different healthcare scenarios and patient groups in different European countries have been conducted in all projects. These have been performed to test the service and the network infrastructure including its suitability for m-health applications.

UbiqLog: a generic mobile phone-based life-log framework

Smartphones are conquering the mobile phone market; they are not just phones; they also act as media players, gaming consoles, personal calendars, storage, etc. They are portable computers with fewer computing capabilities than personal computers. However, unlike personal computers, users can carry their smartphone with them at all times. The ubiquity of mobile phones and their computing capabilities provide an opportunity of using them as a life-logging device. Life-logs (personal e-memories) are used to record users’ daily life events and assist them in memory augmentation. In a more technical sense, life-logs sense and store users’ contextual information from their environment through sensors, which are core components of life-logs. Spatio-temporal aggregation of sensor information can be mapped to users’ life events. We propose UbiqLog, a lightweight, configurable, and extendable life-log framework, which uses mobile phone as a device for life logging. The proposed framework extends previous research in this field, which investigated mobile phones as life-log tool through continuous sensing. Its openness in terms of sensor configuration allows developers to create flexible, multipurpose life-log tools. In addition to that, this framework contains a data model and an architecture, which can be used as reference model for further life-log development, including its extension to other devices, such as ebook readers, T.V.s, etc.

Context-aware middleware architecture for vertical handover support to multi-homed nomadic mobile services

To accommodate the requirements such as high usability and personalization of 4G (mobile) networks, conventional handheld single network-interface mobile devices are evolving into multi-homed devices. Moreover, owing to the recent advances in the mobile middleware technologies, hardware technologies and association with the human user, handheld mobile devices are evolving into data producers and in turn acting as Nomadic Mobile Service (NMS) providers. For these devices, a vertical handover support is essential for the improved and reliable NMS delivery. Also, the fulfillment of the required QoS by the NMS is bounded by the end-to-end QoS (e2eQoS) provided by the underlying heterogeneous networks. To deal with these aspects, we propose a context-aware middleware architecture supporting vertical handover for the NMSs hosted on the handheld mobile devices. We emphasize the following features of the proposed middleware: 1) Context-aware computing based approach which uses an extensive set of context information collected from the mobile device and a fixed network; 2) Provisioning of and interaction with the end-to-end QoS (e2eQoS) predictions context source in the fixed network to obtain near-accurate estimation of the e2eQoS at a certain geographic location and to reduce unnecessary power usage in searching for available networks.

Context-aware QoS provisioning in an m-health service platform

Inevitably, healthcare goes mobile. Recently developed mobile healthcare (i.e., m-health) services allow healthcare professionals to monitor mobile patients vital signs and provide feedback to this patient anywhere at any time. Due to the nature of current supporting mobile service platforms, m-health services are delivered with a best-effort, i.e., there are no guarantees on the delivered Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, we argue that the use of context information in an m-health service platform improves the delivered QoS. We give a first attempt to merge context information with a QoS-aware mobile service platform in the m-health services domain. We illustrate this with an epilepsy tele-monitoring scenario.

Measurements Based Performance Evaluation of 3G Wireless Networks Supporting m-health Services

The emergence of 3G networks gives rise to new mobile services in many different areas of our daily life. Examples of demanding mobile services are mobile-healthcare (i.e. m-health) services allowing the continuous monitoring of a patient’s vital signs. However, a prerequisite for the successful deployment of m-health services are appropriate performance characteristics of transport services offered by an underlying wireless network (e.g. 3G). In this direction, the EU MobiHealth project targeted the evaluation of 3G networks and their ability to support demanding m-health services. The project developed and trialled a patient monitoring system, evaluating at the same time the networks performance. This paper presents measurements based performance evaluation methodology developed and applied to assess network performance from an end-user perspective. In addition, it presents the (selected) speed-related evaluation (best-case scenario) results collected during the project. Our measurements show the dynamicity in the performance of 3G networks and phenomena negatively influencing this performance. Based on the evaluation results, we conclude that in-spite of certain shortcomings of existing 3G networks, they are suitable to support a significant set of m-health services. A set of recommendations provide a road map for both operators and service developers for design and deployment of m-health services.

Mobile psychiatry: towards improving the care for bipolar disorder

BackgroundMental health has long been a neglected problem in global healthcare. The social and economic impacts of conditions affecting the mind are still underestimated. However, in recent years it is becoming more apparent that mental disorders are a growing global concern and there is a necessity of developing novel services and researching effective means of providing interventions to sufferers. Such novel services could include technology-based solutions already used in other healthcare applications but are yet to make their way into standard psychiatric practice.MethodsThis manuscript proposes a system where sensors are utilised to devise an “early warning” system for patients with bipolar disorder. The system, containing wearable and environmental sensors, would collect behavioural data independent from the patient’s self-report. To test the feasibility of the concept, a prototype system was devised, which was followed by trials including four healthy volunteers as well as a bipolar patient.ResultsThe sensors utilised in the study yielded behavioural data which may be of significant use in detecting early effects of a bipolar episode. Basic processing performed on particular data inputs provided information about activity patterns in areas, which are usually strongly influenced by the course of Bipolar Disorder.ConclusionsThe manuscript discusses the basic usage issues and other barriers which are to be tackled before technology-based approaches to mental care can be successfully rolled out and their true value appraised.

Power- and delay-awareness of health telemonitoring services: the mobihealth system case study

Emerging healthcare applications rely on personal mobile devices to monitor and transmit patient vital signs to hospital-backend servers for further analysis. However, these devices have limited resources that must be used optimally in order to meet the application user requirements (e.g. safety, usability, reliability, performance). This paper reports on a case study of a Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease telemonitoring application delivered by the mobihealth system. This system relies on a commercial mobile device with multiple (wireless) Network Interfaces (NI). Our study focuses on how NI activation strategies affect the application end-to-end data delay (important in case of an emergency situation) and the energy consumption of the device (important for device sustainability while a patient is mobile). Our results show the trade-off between end-to-end delay and battery life-time achieved by various NI activation strategies, in combination with application-data flow adaptation for realtime and near real-time data transmission. For a given mobile device, our study shows an increase in battery life-time of 40- 90 %, traded against higher end-to-end data delay. The insights of our studies can be used for application-data flow adaptation aiming to increase battery life-time and device sustainability for mobile patients; which effectively increases the healthcare application usability.

Ambulatory Assessment of Affect: Survey of Sensor Systems for Monitoring of Autonomic Nervous Systems Activation in Emotion

Advances in miniaturized computing, storage and communication resources for personal wearable electronics devices, as well as the availability of diverse sensors for state assessment enable the development of a wide variety of wearable body area network (BAN) systems for psychophysiological measurements. These systems pave the way for acquisition of quality data relevant for research studies, amongst others, on the autonomic nervous system (ANS) activation in emotion. We present a high-level overview of BAN and its features, and we review 173 publications that report research studies on emotion activation and particularly 15 BAN systems employed in these studies. We discuss each BAN in terms of its capacity for ambulatory, i.e., out of the laboratory, assessment of the ANS activation in emotion. Finally, we highlight the design challenges to be addressed to make BAN systems effective for a wide range of applications to support users wellbeing and overall Quality of Life improvement. This paper provides knowledge to those interested in (ambulatory) assessment of the ANS activation on the set of systems currently used in research, and it aims to highlight opportunities for scientists and practitioners in, amongst others, the affective computing domain, enabling them to reflect upon their BAN requirements and study designs.

On the ambiguity of Quality of Service and Quality of Experience requirements for eHealth services

The use of end-to-end communication systems as a medium of delivery for electronic healthcare (eHealth) services is considered to be uncertain, with respect to its reliability leading to hesitation in acceptance of such services. There exist different influential dimensions that pose stringent requirements on end-to-end communication systems, influence user perception and might hinder user acceptance. The later is referred to as Quality of Experience (QoE), which among others depends on the Quality of Service (QoS) of the end-to-end communication system. QoE is considered as a key component determining user acceptance. This paper identifies and analyzes characteristics of a set of eHealth services and the influential dimensions resulting in different QoS requirements and potential impact of QoS on QoE. It highlights the role of QoS and QoE for acceptance of these services. The issue of non-uniform views regarding QoS parameter specifications and related requirements, clinically acceptable thresholds and their qualitative representation in eHealth literature is reviewed and presented.

Towards qos-awareness of context-aware mobile applications and services

In our current connected wireless world, mobile devices are enabled to use various networking facilities. Although this enables mobile users to communicate any time and any place, it may also be very intrusive. There is a high need to manage the information stream a user receives on his/her mobile device. Context-awareness seems to be a promising way to manage this information stream and to provide the means to communicate at the right time in the right way. Current context-aware applications benefit from the user context (e.g. location information), however, they do not consider the quality of service (QoS) offered by various networks (i.e. only best-effort QoS is considered). The research discussed in this paper focuses on a QoS- and context-aware service infrastructure supporting the development of mobile applications in a heterogeneous network environment. We argue that the use of context information helps to better capture the user’s required QoS and improves the delivered QoS.