Nancy L. Laplante

Building Caring Healthcare Systems in the Internet of Things

The nature of healthcare and the computational and physical technologies and constraints present a number of challenges to systems designers and implementers. In spite of the challenges, there is a significant market for systems and products to support caregivers in their tasks as the number of people needing assistance grows substantially. In this paper, we present a structured approach for describing Internet of Things (IoT) for healthcare systems. We illustrate the approach for three use cases and discuss relevant quality issues that arise, in particular, the need to consider caring as a requirement.

A Structured approach for describing healthcare applications for the Internet of Things

Applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare have been widely forecast, investigated, and even deployed on a small scale. But most of this work is scattered about a few random applications. In this paper we present a structured approach for describing IoTs for healthcare by defining general classes of system types, classifying the healthcare delivery settings, then using a structured approach to describing the elements for a particular use case. We illustrate the approach for three use cases and discuss certain issues that arise. A brief survey of related work is also given. We conclude that for healthcare applications, domain understanding and inter-professional collaboration are critical to developing realistic use cases.

The nonfunctional requirement focus in medical device software: a systematic mapping study and taxonomy

This paper describes the results and analysis of a systematic mapping study of research focusing on the nonfunctional requirements in software intensive medical devices. The review covered 238 journal papers from five digital libraries. The 55 papers that met the review inclusion criteria focused on 22 NFRs, each describing a unique system behavior quality. The most dominant of these NFRs were interoperability,usability,performance,security, privacy, safety, and accuracy. A noticeable NFR gap is the notion of caring. It is not readily apparent how a medical device that monitors a patient or delivers medications or anesthetics can “care about” the sufferings, feelings and emotional needs of a patient; however, in the healthcare arena these are valid concerns. A second theme found in the papers reviewed focused on software standards/process improvement when developing software intensive medical devices. This research also provides an analysis of the software architecture tactics those researchers utilized to implement the NFRs in the medical devices.

Standards for the Internet of Things: A Case Study in Disaster Response

The IoT is potentially the next great technological revolution, promising fantastic economic benefits, improved quality of life, and even the easing of human suffering. However, it also presents unprecedented security and privacy risks and potential safety concerns. Standardizing IoT devices and connections is the key to fully realized economic benefits and safe interoperability, particularly among systems.

Stakeholder Identification and Use Case Representation for Internet-of-Things Applications in Healthcare

We describe the initial process of eliciting requirements for an Internet-of-things (IoT) application involving a hospital emergency room. First, we discuss the process of modeling IoT systems through rich pictures and use cases. Then, we demonstrate how these can be used to model emergency room systems. Then, we create use case models for a particular situation—a patient potentially suffering from a myocardial infarction. Finally, we discuss generalization of the specific case to a broader hospital wide system. We believe that such an approach can lead to increased efficiency, increased safety, and better tracking of people, equipment, and supplies.