Kunal Mankodiya

Towards fog-driven IoT eHealth: Promises and challenges of IoT in medicine and healthcare

Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) offers a seamless platform to connect people and objects to one another for enriching and making our lives easier. This vision carries us from compute-based centralized schemes to a more distributed environment offering a vast amount of applications such as smart wearables, smart home, smart mobility, and smart cities. In this paper we discuss applicability of IoT in healthcare and medicine by presenting a holistic architecture of IoT eHealth ecosystem. Healthcare is becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to insufficient and less effective healthcare services to meet the increasing demands of rising aging population with chronic diseases. We propose that this requires a transition from the clinic-centric treatment to patient-centric healthcare where each agent such as hospital, patient, and services are seamlessly connected to each other. This patient-centric IoT eHealth ecosystem needs a multi-layer architecture: (1) device, (2) fog computing and (3) cloud to empower handling of complex data in terms of its variety, speed, and latency. This fog-driven IoT architecture is followed by various case examples of services and applications that are implemented on those layers. Those examples range from mobile health, assisted living, e-medicine, implants, early warning systems, to population monitoring in smart cities. We then finally address the challenges of IoT eHealth such as data management, scalability, regulations, interoperability, device–network–human interfaces, security, and privacy.

Wearable Internet of Things: Concept, architectural components and promises for person-centered healthcare

The proliferation of mobile devices, ubiquitous internet, and cloud computing has sparked a new era of Internet of Things (IoT), thus allowing researchers to create application-specific solutions based on the interconnection between physical objects and the internet. Recently, wearable devices are rapidly emerging and forming a new segment-“Wearable IoT (WIoT)” due to their capability of sensing, computing and communication. Future generations of WIoT promise to transform the healthcare sector, wherein individuals are seamlessly tracked by wearable sensors for personalized health and wellness information-body vital parameters, physical activity, behaviors, and other critical parameters impacting quality of daily life. This paper presents an effort to conceptualize WIoT in terms of their design, function, and applications. We discuss the building blocks of WIoT-including wearable sensors, internet-connected gateways and cloud and big data support-that are key to its future success in healthcare domain applications. We also present a new system science for WIoT that suggests future directions, encompassing operational and clinical aspects.

SPARK: Personalized Parkinson Disease Interventions through Synergy between a Smartphone and a Smartwatch

Parkinson disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder afflicting more than 1 million aging Americans, incurring

Fit: A Fog Computing Device for Speech Tele-Treatments

23 billion in annual medical costs in the U.S. alone. Approximately 90% Parkinson patients undergoing treatment have mobility related problems related to medication which prevent them doing their activities of daily living. Efficient management of PD requires complex medication regimens specifically titrated to individuals’ needs. These personalized regimens are difficult to maintain for the patient and difficult to prescribe for a physician in the few minutes available during office visits. Diverging from current form of laboratory-ridden wearable sensor technologies, we have developed SPARK, a framework that leverages a synergistic combination of Smartphone and Smartwatch in monitoring multidimensional symptoms – such as facial tremors, dysfunctional speech, limb dyskinesia, and gait abnormalities. In addition, SPARK allows physicians to conduct effective tele-interventions on PD patients when they are in non-clinical settings (e.g., at home or work). Initial case series that use SPARK framework show promising results of monitoring multidimensional PD symptoms and provide a glimpse of its potential use in real-world, personalized PD interventions.

Challenges and Opportunities for Embedded Computing in Retail Environments

There is an increasing demand for smart fog-computing gateways as the size of cloud data is growing. This paper presents a Fog computing interface (FIT) for processing clinical speech data. FIT builds upon our previous work on EchoWear, a wearable technology that validated the use of smartwatches for collecting clinical speech data from patients with Parkinsons disease (PD). The fog interface is a low-power embedded system that acts as a smart interface between the smartwatch and the cloud. It collects, stores, and processes the speech data before sending speech features to secure cloud storage. We developed and validated a working prototype of FIT that enabled remote processing of clinical speech data to get speech clinical features such as loudness, short-time energy, zero-crossing rate, and spectral centroid. We used speech data from six patients with PD in their homes for validating FIT. Our results showed the efficacy of FIT as a Fog interface to translate the clinical speech processing chain (CLIP) from a cloud-based backend to a fog-based smart gateway.

A multi-smartwatch system for assessing speech characteristics of people with dysarthria in group settings

In the retail industry, real-time product location tends to be a multi-million-dollar problem because of seasonal restocking, varying store layouts, personnel training, diversity of products, etc. Stores maintain planograms, which are detailed product-level maps of the store layout. Unfortunately, these planograms are obsolete by the time that they are constructed (because it takes weeks to get them right), thereby significantly diminishing their value to the store staff, to consumers, and to product manufacturers/suppliers. The AndyVision project at Carnegie Mellon focuses on the fundamental problem of real-time planogram construction and planogram integrity. This problem, if solved correctly, has the potential to transform the retail industry, both in the back-office operations and in the front-of-the-store consumer experience.

Fog Computing in Medical Internet-of-Things: Architecture, Implementation, and Applications

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) frequently use vocal exercises in the treatment of patients with speech disorders. Patients receive treatment in a clinical setting and need to practice outside of the clinical setting to generalize speech goals to functional communication. In this paper, we describe the development of technology that captures mixed speech signals in a group setting and allows the SLP to analyze the speech signals relative to treatment goals. The mixed speech signals are blindly separated into individual signals that are preprocessed before computation of loudness, pitch, shimmer, jitter, semitone standard deviation and sharpness. The proposed method has been previously validated on data obtained from clinical trials of people with Parkinson disease and healthy controls.

BigEAR: Inferring the Ambient and Emotional Correlates from Smartphone-Based Acoustic Big Data

In the era when the market segment of Internet of Things (IoT) tops the chart in various business reports, it is apparently envisioned that the field of medicine expects to gain a large benefit from the explosion of wearables and internet-connected sensors that surround us to acquire and communicate unprecedented data on symptoms, medication, food intake, and daily-life activities impacting ones health and wellness. However, IoT-driven healthcare would have to overcome many barriers, such as: 1) There is an increasing demand for data storage on cloud servers where the analysis of the medical big data becomes increasingly complex, 2) The data, when communicated, are vulnerable to security and privacy issues, 3) The communication of the continuously collected data is not only costly but also energy hungry, 4) Operating and maintaining the sensors directly from the cloud servers are non-trial tasks. This book chapter defined Fog Computing in the context of medical IoT. Conceptually, Fog Computing is a service-oriented intermediate layer in IoT, providing the interfaces between the sensors and cloud servers for facilitating connectivity, data transfer, and queryable local database. The centerpiece of Fog computing is a low-power, intelligent, wireless, embedded computing node that carries out signal conditioning and data analytics on raw data collected from wearables or other medical sensors and offers efficient means to serve telehealth interventions. We implemented and tested an fog computing system using the Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi that allows acquisition, computing, storage and communication of the various medical data such as pathological speech data of individuals with speech disorders, Phonocardiogram (PCG) signal for heart rate estimation, and Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based Q, R, S detection.

Internet-of-Things and big data for smarter healthcare: from device to architecture, applications and analytics

This paper presents a novel BigEAR big data framework that employs psychological audio processing chain (PAPC) to process smartphone-based acoustic big data collected when the user performs social conversations in naturalistic scenarios. The overarching goal of BigEAR is to identify moods of the wearer from various activities such as laughing, singing, crying, arguing, and sighing. These annotations are based on ground truth relevant for psychologists who intend to monitor/infer the social context of individuals coping with breast cancer. We pursued a case study on couples coping with breast cancer to know how the conversations affect emotional and social well being. In the state-of-the-art methods, psychologists and their team have to hear the audio recordings for making these inferences by subjective evaluations that not only are time-consuming and costly, but also demand manual data coding for thousands of audio files. The BigEAR framework automates the audio analysis. We computed the accuracy of BigEAR with respect to the ground truth obtained from a human rater. Our approach yielded overall average accuracy of 88.76% on real-world data from couples coping with breast cancer.

Pulse-Glasses: An unobtrusive, wearable HR monitor with Internet-of-Things functionality

Abstract The technology and healthcare industries have been deeply intertwined for quite some time. New opportunities, however, are now arising as a result of fast-paced expansion in the areas of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data. In addition, as people across the globe have begun to adopt wearable biosensors, new applications for individualized eHealth and mHealth technologies have emerged. The upsides of these technologies are clear: they are highly available, easily accessible, and simple to personalize; additionally they make it easy for providers to deliver individualized content cost-effectively, at scale. At the same time, a number of hurdles currently stand in the way of truly reliable, adaptive, safe and efficient personal healthcare devices. Major technological milestones will need to be reached in order to address and overcome those hurdles; and that will require closer collaboration between hardware and software developers and medical personnel such as physicians, nurses, and healthcare workers. The purpose of this special issue is to analyze the top concerns in IoT technologies that pertain to smart sensors for health care applications; particularly applications targeted at individualized tele-health interventions with the goal of enabling healthier ways of life. These applications include wearable and body sensors, advanced pervasive healthcare systems, and the Big Data analytics required to inform these devices.