Electronic Healthcare Applications Research Articles

Envisaging the intention and adoption of electronic health applications among middle-aged and older adults: Evidence from an emerging economy.

Technology plays a substantial role in our daily lives, and the spread of COVID-19 paves the way for the use of healthcare technologies to manage health in the comfort of our homes. Middle-aged and older adults face health issues and require instant healthcare advice and support. Electronic healthcare (EH) applications have emerged to facilitate middle-aged and older adults receiving healthcare support instantly while remaining in their homes. The present study empirically evaluates the intention and adoption of electronic health applications with the technological attributes of perceived compatibility, cost, product value, technology accuracy, privacy issues and health motivation among middle-aged and older adults from Malaysia. Moreover, this research examines the mediating effect of the intention to adopt EH applications between technology attributes and the adoption of EH applications. This study uses a cross-sectional method and employs an online survey to assemble quantitative data from 298 middle-aged and older Malaysian adults. It utilizes partial least squares structural equation modelling for data analysis. The data analysis reveals that perceived compatibility, cost, privacy, product value and health motivation significantly influenced the intention to use EH apps. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the intention to adopt EH apps significantly mediates the relationship between the perception of cost, personal privacy, product value, health motivation and adoption of EH apps. However, the intention to use EH apps insignificantly instigates their adoption. Finally, the study presents its implications, limitations and future research directions.

Electronic healthcare applications and programs among healthcare workers in Riyadh and conflict management

ObjectiveElectronic healthcare applications and programmes enable the use of computers, networks, and information technology to improve healthcare quality and patient safety, and secure confidential access to health information in order to enable individuals and communities to make the best possible health decisions. We study conflicts challenging users of e-health electronic applications and programmes in Riyadh. MethodsWe use a cross-sectional descriptive design to target all healthcare professionals who interact with e-health applications and programmes. Healthcare providers took a questionnaire survey online. ResultsOf the 169 responses to our questionnaire, 78.1% are female, and 46.2% are aged between 31 and 40 years. As many as 59.2% always use these applications, and 33.7% use them occasionally. Only 7.10% of the participants rarely or never use them. As many as 31.4% recognized that these applications led to conflicts at the workplace. Of these, 50.6%, 13.6%, and 35.8% stated that they caused decision-related, ethical, and other types of conflicts, respectively. ConclusionWe conducted this study among healthcare providers in Riyadh, KSA, and found that the use of e-health applications and programmes encountered some difficulties.

An Energy-Efficient and Secure Data Inference Framework for Internet of Health Things: A Pilot Study.

Privacy protection in electronic healthcare applications is an important consideration, due to the sensitive nature of personal health data. Internet of Health Things (IoHT) networks that are used within a healthcare setting have unique challenges and security requirements (integrity, authentication, privacy, and availability) that must also be balanced with the need to maintain efficiency in order to conserve battery power, which can be a significant limitation in IoHT devices and networks. Data are usually transferred without undergoing filtering or optimization, and this traffic can overload sensors and cause rapid battery consumption when interacting with IoHT networks. This poses certain restrictions on the practical implementation of these devices. In order to address these issues, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving two-tier data inference framework solution that conserves battery consumption by inferring the sensed data and reducing data size for transmission, while also protecting sensitive data from leakage to adversaries. The results from experimental evaluations on efficiency and privacy show the validity of the proposed scheme, as well as significant data savings without compromising data transmission accuracy, which contributes to energy efficiency of IoHT sensor devices.

Energy-Efficient Protocol of Link Scheduling in Cognitive Radio Body Area Networks for Medical and Healthcare Applications.

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have become a new paradigm for electronic healthcare applications; for instance, they are used to efficiently monitor patients in real-time. In this paper, an energy-efficient link scheduling (ELS) protocol for cognitive radio body area networks (CRBANs) is proposed, which aims to minimize energy consumption in CRBANs, while achieving higher probabilities of successful transmissions with multiple CRBANs. The proposed ELS transmits packets in the common control channel to control transmission links amongst CRBANs to the gateway and vice versa. The transmissions of CRBANs to the gateway are scheduled at a specific time by the gateway in different data channels, according to the traffic priority of CRBANs. Packet delivery ratio, delay, and energy consumption are evaluated for multiple CRBANs via extensive simulation.

Hiding Electronic Patient Record (EPR) in medical images: A high capacity and computationally efficient technique for e-healthcare applications

A high capacity and semi-reversible data hiding scheme based on Pixel Repetition Method (PRM) and hybrid edge detection for scalable medical images has been proposed in this paper. PRM has been used to scale up the small sized image (seed image) and hybrid edge detection ensures that no important edge information is missed. The scaled up version of seed image has been divided into 2×2 non overlapping blocks. In each block there is one seed pixel whose status decides the number of bits to be embedded in the remaining three pixels of that block. The Electronic Patient Record (EPR)/data have been embedded by using Least Significant and Intermediate Significant Bit Substitution (ISBS). The RC4 encryption has been used to add an additional security layer for embedded EPR/data. The proposed scheme has been tested for various medical and general images and compared with some state of art techniques in the field. The experimental results reveal that the proposed scheme besides being semi-reversible and computationally efficient is capable of handling high payload and as such can be used effectively for electronic healthcare applications.

Transparent, stretchable, and rapid-response humidity sensor for body-attachable wearable electronics

Stretchable and conformal humidity sensors that can be attached to the human body for continuously monitoring the humidity of the environment around the human body or the moisture level of the human skin can play an important role in electronic skin and personal healthcare applications. However, most stretchable humidity sensors are based on the geometric engineering of non-stretchable components and only a few detailed studies are available on stretchable humidity sensors under applied mechanical deformations. In this paper, we propose a transparent, stretchable humidity sensor with a simple fabrication process, having intrinsically stretchable components that provide high stretchability, sensitivity, and stability along with fast response and relaxation time. Composed of reduced graphene oxide-polyurethane composites and an elastomeric conductive electrode, this device exhibits impressive response and relaxation time as fast as 3.5 and 7 s, respectively. The responsivity and the response and relaxation time of the device in the presence of humidity remain almost unchanged under stretching up to a strain of 60% and after 10,000 stretching cycles at a 40% strain. Further, these stretchable humidity sensors can be easily and conformally attached to a finger for monitoring the humidity levels of the environment around the human body, wet objects, or human skin.

The Law as a ‘Catalyst and Facilitator’ for Trust in E-Health: Challenges and Opportunities

In 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a report on the state of development of legal frameworks with regard to e-health. The report is based on the findings of the WHO’s Second Global Survey on E-Health, which analysed, amongst other things, the extent to which the legal frameworks in the Member States addressed the need to protect patients’ privacy in the use of electronic healthcare applications. Based on the results obtained, the WHO stressed the fact that although in most member countries there exists a high level of legal protection of the general privacy of health-related information, this does not go beyond the common human right of privacy. There exists little specific e-health related privacy protection legislation and much remains to be explored in terms of other legal safeguards. This article intends to broaden the WHO’s analysis and go somewhat further, exploring not only the challenges and opportunities with regard to privacy protection, but also liability laws, which could have a significant impact on the use and adoption of these technology applications.

Information interchange services for electronic health record databases

Healthcare information is complex and distributed in nature. Patient care and a health condition commonly require collaboration between several clinicians. Such an integration of information is important to retrieve patient history, for knowledge sharing and to formulate queries. Large scale adoption of electronic healthcare applications requires semantic interoperability because patients have become mobile, treatment and healthcare providers have increased, and also, have become more specialised. Similar to the web, information retrieval is key feature of these end-user systems. The paper analyses the role of semantic interoperability in various cross-organisational business processes in healthcare domain. The system modelling approach has been analysed with a view of supporting system-to-system and user-system interactions. The paper presents a comparison of the existing information and querying methods and studies their applicability to the dual-level electronic health records (EHRs) systems. It further discusses the best approach to build a user-friendly querying interface for these systems.

AQBE — QBE Style Queries for Archetyped Data

Large-scale adoption of electronic healthcare applications requires semantic interoperability. The new proposals propose an advanced (multi-level) DBMS architecture for repository services for health records of patients. These also require query interfaces at multiple levels and at the level of semi-skilled users. In this regard, a high-level user interface for querying the new form of standardized Electronic Health Records system has been examined in this study. It proposes a step-by-step graphical query interface to allow semi-skilled users to write queries. Its aim is to decrease user effort and communication ambiguities, and increase user friendliness.

Handbook of Research on Advances in Health Informatics and Electronic Healthcare Applications: Global Adoption and Impact of Information Communication Technologies

Handbook of Research on Advances in Health Informatics and Electronic Healthcare Applications: Global Adoption and Impact of Information Communication Technologies