KeeHyun Park

UbiMMS: an ubiquitous medication monitoring system based on remote device management methods.

Medication adherence is one of the most important factors in treating chronic diseases. However, current medication dispensers, which are devices that deliver medication to chronic disease patients according to predetermined schedules, are not equipped with internal remote management functions. Here, we propose a ubiquitous medication monitoring system (UbiMMS) that provides remote functions for medication status transmission, configuration management, software management, and real-time error management. We provide an overview and performance evaluation of the UbiMMS, and show that the proposed system is adequate for remotely monitoring and managing a medication dispenser in real time.

An Integrated Gateway for Various PHDs in U-Healthcare Environments

We propose an integrated gateway for various personal health devices (PHDs). This gateway receives measurements from various PHDs and conveys them to a remote monitoring server (MS). It provides two kinds of transmission modes: immediate transmission and integrated transmission. The former mode operates if a measurement exceeds a predetermined threshold or in the case of an emergency. In the latter mode, the gateway retains the measurements instead of forwarding them. When the reporting time comes, the gateway extracts all the stored measurements, integrates them into one message, and transmits the integrated message to the MS. Through this mechanism, the transmission overhead can be reduced. On the basis of the proposed gateway, we construct a u-healthcare system comprising an activity monitor, a medication dispenser, and a pulse oximeter. The evaluation results show that the size of separate messages from various PHDs is reduced through the integration process, and the process does not require much time; the integration time is negligible.

Construction of a Smart Medication Dispenser with High Degree of Scalability and Remote Manageability

We propose a smart medication dispenser having a high degree of scalability and remote manageability. We construct the dispenser to have extensible hardware architecture for achieving scalability, and we install an agent program in it for achieving remote manageability. The dispenser operates as follows: when the real-time clock reaches the predetermined medication time and the user presses the dispense button at that time, the predetermined medication is dispensed from the medication dispensing tray (MDT). In the proposed dispenser, the medication for each patient is stored in an MDT. One smart medication dispenser contains mainly one MDT; however, the dispenser can be extended to include more MDTs in order to support multiple users using one dispenser. For remote management, the proposed dispenser transmits the medication status and the system configurations to the monitoring server. In the case of a specific event such as a shortage of medication, memory overload, software error, or non-adherence, the event is transmitted immediately. All these operations are performed automatically without the intervention of patients, through the agent program installed in the dispenser. Results of implementation and verification show that the proposed dispenser operates normally and performs the management operations from the medication monitoring server suitably.

A Smart Personal Activity Monitoring System Based on Wireless Device Management Methods

Lack of physical activity can cause obesity, diabetes, hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases. To prevent these diseases, experts recommend regular physical exercise. In this paper, a Smart Personal Activity Monitoring System (SPAMS) is proposed in order to enhance the effectiveness of physical activities. The proposed system consists of a Physical Activity Measurement Device (PAMD), a Physical Activity Computation Device (PACD) and a Device Management Server (DMS). The proposed system offers personalized exercise programs based on individual body characteristics, and a remote device management service operated by system administrators, using a wireless device management method, specifically Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Device Management (DM), as it is the international de facto standard for mobile device management. In this paper, we present a practical method for using OMA DM to personalize and manage the SPAMS and also present the implementation results.

Efficient message encoding method for personal health device monitoring system

Recently, the use of personal health devices (PHDs) has greatly increased. A PHD is a device that measures, collects, and analyzes the users biometric (medical) data. In a scenario where multiple PHDs of various types are being used, device management (DM) for PHDs is a very important issue. Meanwhile, the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DM protocol, which uses extensible markup language (XML) for DM messages, has been proposed as an international standard for mobile DM. Because of the expansibility and platform independency of this protocol, it has found widespread application in various management/monitoring systems for software, networks, PHDs, etc. However, XML messages typically tend to be considerably larger than the amount of actual data, which causes transmission efficiency problems, especially in PHD monitoring system. To solve the problems, a new encoding method called modified run-length encoding (MRLE) is proposed in this paper. The MRLE is described as follows. First, an XML DM message is modified by applying an XOR operation to the previously transmitted and the in-transmission XML DM messages. This causes a majority of the modified DM message to become zero. Second, the original RLE is applied to the modified DM message before transmission. This significantly reduces the size of the modified DM message because it contains a number of zeros. To verify the proposed method, we implement the method in a pulse oximeter monitoring system based on the OMA DM protocol. Next, we compare the performance of the proposed method with that of XML, WBXML and the original RLE in terms of their compression ratios and times. The results of the experiments indicate that the compression ratio of the MRLE is evidently superior to those of the compared methods and that the compression/decompression times of the MRLE is similar to that of the original RLE. Therefore, the proposed method in this paper is not only simple and easy but also highly effective for mobile DM message transmission.

Data Synchronization Operations for a Monitoring System with a Very Large Number of PHDs

Various PHDs (Personal Healthcare Devices) have been developed to enable the easy monitoring of individual bio-signals. But while most of the related studies have dealt only with 1:1 communication between a PHD and a monitoring server, serious bottleneck problems at the monitoring server are inevitable in real world in which a very large number of PHD users are monitored. In this paper, data synchronization operations for a hierarchical monitoring system to be applied when a very large number of PHD clients are used are proposed. Detailed execution mechanisms for data synchronization operations are described. After every component uses XOR operations to calculate the difference between what it had in the past and what it has now, it stores the difference in its own table and sends the difference to the component in the upper layer in order to reduce storage/communication costs.

Efficient Transmission Method for Mobile Data Synchronization Based on Data Characteristics

In this paper, the modified Huffman encoding method is proposed for the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Data Synchronization (DS) packages. The proposed method encodes each DS element and property names of personal information management system (PIMS) data based on the characteristics of DS packages. In the proposed method, the occurrence probabilities for all DS elements and the property names of PIMS data are predetermined. And then two Huffman tables are constructed. Clients and a DS server maintain these Huffman table instead of exchanging their Huffman tree. This is possible since DS elements are sequence of alphabetic symbols and the occurrence probability of each DS element is predictable. Some experiments show that, the average compression ratios of WAP Binary XML (WBXML) were 67.94% for session connection and disconnection packages, and 51.25% for data transmission packages, while the ratios of the proposed method were 70.63 and 62.57%. And the gap between two methods is ever widening as the number of synchronization data increases. Since data transmission packages are exchanged much more frequently, the proposed method based on Huffman is far more effective in mobile data synchronization.

A Multilayer Secure Biomedical Data Management System for Remotely Managing a Very Large Number of Diverse Personal Healthcare Devices

In this paper, a multilayer secure biomedical data management system for managing a very large number of diverse personal health devices is proposed. The system has the following characteristics: the system supports international standard communication protocols to achieve interoperability. The system is integrated in the sense that both a PHD communication system and a remote PHD management system work together as a single system. Finally, the system proposed in this paper provides user/message authentication processes to securely transmit biomedical data measured by PHDs based on the concept of a biomedical signature. Some experiments, including the stress test, have been conducted to show that the system proposed/constructed in this study performs very well even when a very large number of PHDs are used. For a stress test, up to 1,200 threads are made to represent the same number of PHD agents. The loss ratio of the ISO/IEEE 11073 messages in the normal system is as high as 14% when 1,200 PHD agents are connected. On the other hand, no message loss occurs in the multilayered system proposed in this study, which demonstrates the superiority of the multilayered system to the normal system with regard to heavy traffic.

A Group Data Synchronization Protocol in Mobile Environments

As mobile devices are being used extensively, for both personal and business applications, Data Synchronization (DS) technology faces a new challenge. Unlike personal data, it is sometimes necessary to share or propagate business data between co-workers. Therefore, mobile devices should be fully synchronized as a group. This paper refers to this operation a “group data synchronization (Group DS)”. In this paper, a new Group DS protocol that is compatible with the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DS protocol is proposed, implemented, and analyzed. OMA DS is an open industry-standard protocol for mobile DS environments. To achieve this, the OMA data record formats have been extended, the Server Alerted Sync operation has been implemented and new conflict detection/resolution policies have been established. In addition, a vote operation has been implemented to improve the synchronization reliability. The implementation results show that the memory required by the Group DS system is modest, and that the overall synchronization time does not substantially increase with an increase in the number of devices.