Ubiquitous Healthcare Environment Research Articles

Assessing sustainable effectiveness of the adjustment mechanism of a ubiquitous clinic recommendation system

Advances in computer and communication technologies have engendered opportunities for developing an improved ubiquitous health care environment. One of the crucial applications is a ubiquitous clinic recommendation system, which entails recommending a suitable clinic to a mobile patient based on his/her location, hospital department, and preferences. However, patients may not be willing or able to express their preferences. To overcome this problem, some ubiquitous clinic recommendation systems mine the historical data of patients to learn their preferences, and they apply an algorithm to adjust the recommendation algorithm after receiving more patient data. Such an adjustment mechanism may operate for several periods; however, this raises a question regarding the sustainability (i.e., long-term effectiveness) of such an adjustment mechanism. To address this question, this study modeled the improvement in the successful recommendation rate of a ubiquitous clinic recommendation system that adopts an adjustment mechanism as a learning process. Both the asymptotic value and learning speed of the learning process provide valuable information regarding the long-term effectiveness of the adjustment mechanism. The proposed methodology was applied in a regional study to a ubiquitous clinic recommendation system that adjusts the recommendation mechanism by solving an integer nonlinear programming problem on a rolling basis. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method exhibited a considerably higher level of accuracy in forecasting the successful recommendation rate compared with several existing methods. Although the adjustment mechanism exhibits long-term effectiveness, the learning speed requires improvement.

Development of a Patch-Type Electrocardiographic Monitor for Real Time Heartbeat Detection and Heart Rate Variability Analysis

It is essential to perform real time monitoring of the cardiac and physical activities in patients with cardiovascular diseases. Thus, the objective of this research was to develop a one-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) patch monitor for the detection of heartbeats and the calculation of frequency-domain parameters (as a mental index) of heart rate variability in real time. Consisting of a microcontroller with ARM 3 core and embedded with a three-axis accelerometer, this monitor could real time provide some additional information related to user’s daily physical activities. Main specification items of the ECG patch monitor were found to meet the standards of the International Electrotechnical Commission for medical electrical equipment and ambulatory electrocardiography systems (Holter ECG system). Its ingress protection rating, for instance, was found to be 68°. Thus, the ECG patch monitor allowed users to put it on all day, and to do various kinds of exercises or sports, even including swimming. In order to let users feel comfortable, it was designed to be of light weight and could run for over 24 h. A 4 GB flash memory was installed in the apparatus for data storage. The performance of the heartbeat detection algorithm was evaluated by using the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The results showed a sensitivity of 99.7% and a positive predictivity of 99.0% for the cardiac rhythm detection. Meanwhile, a mobile application algorithm allowed users to adjust some functions of the ECG patch monitor and to display the heart rate, mental index, and physical activities in 1 day. When users felt chest discomfort, they could push a button on the ECG patch monitor and 1-min ECG signals would be sent to the mobile device via Bluetooth 4.0. Based on the testing results, the patch-based ECG apparatus may be suitable for different types of users to apply in a ubiquitous healthcare environment, especially for those with a potential cardiac disease.

A Trust Model for Ubiquitous Healthcare Environment on the Basis of Adaptable Fuzzy-Probabilistic Inference System.

Trust is considered to be a determinant on psychologist selection which can ensure patient satisfaction. Hence, trust concept is essential to be introduced into ubiquitous healthcare (UH) environment oriented on patients with anxiety disorders. This is accomplished by trust model estimating psychologists' trustworthiness, a priory to service delivery, with the use of patient's and his/her acquaintances testimonies, i.e., personal interaction experience and reputation (R). In this paper, a trust model is proposed to be materialized via an adaptable cloud inference system (ACIS) that performs trust value (TV) estimation. Taking advantage of a cloud theory, the introduced ACIS estimates TVs via fuzzy-probabilistic reasoning incorporating a cloud relation operator (soft AND) which is proposed to be tuned by trust information sources consistency and coherency. Theoretical analysis along with comparative study conducted within MATLAB environment and experimental investigation verify the effectiveness of the proposed ACIS materialization under different conditions. Especially, the innovative features of ACIS enable TV to be estimated with 45.5% and 62% on average higher accuracy to that providing state-of-the-art trust models, within clean environment and under the influence of large-scale collusive malicious attacks, respectively. The enhanced robustness permits the untrustworthy UH providers to be discriminated with true positive rate at the range of 0.9 although 40% of R testimonies are erroneous. Finally, experimental investigation validates that the adoption of the proposed trust model for psychologists trustworthiness estimation facilitates patient satisfaction to be achieved into UH environment.

Privacy Is Healthy

There are numerous privacy challenges specific to healthcare, ranging from patient expectations for confidentiality to sensors designed to collect health-related data that falls outside the bounds of traditional medical practice. All of these challenges make healthcare a unique environment when it comes to privacy. Learn what ubicomp researchers and practitioners can do to improve the state of privacy in a ubiquitous healthcare environment.

Designing for practice-based context-awareness in ubiquitous e-health environments

Existing approaches for supporting context-aware knowledge sharing in ubiquitous healthcare give little attention to practice-based structures of knowledge representation. They guide knowledge re-use at an abstract level and hardly incorporate details of actionable tasks and processes necessary for accomplishing work in a real-world context. This paper presents a context-aware model for supporting clinical knowledge sharing across organizational and geographical boundaries in ubiquitous e-health. The model draws on activity and situation awareness theories as well as the Belief-Desire Intention and Case-based Reasoning techniques in intelligent systems with the goal of enabling clinicians in disparate locations to gain a common representation of relevant situational information in each other's work contexts based on the notion of practice. We discuss the conceptual design of the model, present a formal approach for representing practice as context in a ubiquitous healthcare environment, and describe an application scenario and a prototype system to evaluate the proposed approach.

A comprehensive Reputation mechanism for ubiquitous healthcare environment exploiting cloud model.

Absence of trust foundations may outweigh benefits of ubiquitous and personalized mental healthcare supervision provided within a Ubiquitous Healthcare environment (UH). Trust is composed by patient's Personal Interaction Experience (PIE) and social entourage accumulated PIE, i.e. Reputation (R). In this paper, a cloud-based Reputation mechanism is proposed. Since PIE is the elementary trust information source, also an Updating mechanism of PIE, is introduced, in this paper. Cloud materialization of combined mechanisms provides adaptability to UH Providers' dynamic behavior, facilitates detection of milking behaviors and complex malicious attacks while meets the challenge of limited accuracy in case of data sparseness. The effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms is verified via simulation in MATLAB.

융합형 u-헬스케어 서비스에서 헬스 정보 교환을 위한 키 트리 기반 관리 체계 설계

u-헬스케어에서는 무선 센서와 에드혹 네트워크를 통해 사용자의 건강 정보, 응급 정보를 수집, 분석하고 있으며 상호 운용이 가능한 전자 헬스 정보의 기록 및 전송을 위하여 동적인 액세스 제어를 수행하고 있다. 네트워크 시스템을 이용한 u-헬스케어의 경우 상호 운용 가능한 전자 건강 기록과 민감한 환자 의료 정보 전송은 개인 정보 보호 및 보안에 대한 문제점을 해결하기 위하여 키 관리 체계를 사용하고 있으나 동적인 액세스 제어에서는 그룹 키 관리가 어려우며 그룹에서 접근 맴버를 추가하거나 삭제할 경우에 매번 그룹 키를 변경해야하는 문제점을 가지고 있다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 유비쿼터스 헬스 케어의 동적 액세스를 수행하는 네트워크 환경에서 헬스 정보 교환을 위한 융합형 키 관리 체계방식을 제안한다. The threats to privacy and security have received increasing attention as ubiquitous healthcare applications over the Internet become more prevalent, mobile and universal. In particular, we address the communication security issues of access sharing of health information resources in the ubiquitous healthcare environment. The proposed scheme resolves the sender and data authentication problem in information systems and group communications. We propose a novel key management scheme for generating and distributing cryptographic keys to constituent users to provide form of data encryption method for certain types of data concerning resource constraints for secure communications in the ubiquitous healthcare domains.

RSA-DABE: A Novel Approach for Secure Health Data Sharing in Ubiquitous Computing Environment

Contemporary business models deals with gargantuan amount of data which governs the complete business body and such mammoth amount of data need to be shared among distributed entities for better productivity. In this paper we have proposed a secure data sharing model which ensures that the data remains unaltered while sharing it with other entities. Any information which is shared with other system entities gets vanished from the data owner, which makes data sharing more vulnerable in the present scenario. The proposed model incorporates the concept of assigning distributed authority which takes care of the shared information. The model adopts the distributed attribute based encryption technique to secure the data sharing process in a distributed environment and implemented against the traditional attribute based model and proved that the attribute spooling is eliminated. To enable a secure data sharing and access in a multi access ubiquitous environment, the proposed secured data sharing protocol enhances the attribute based encryption for distributed environment (DABE). The security model uses a two-folded approach for enabling secure data sharing among the parties, initially it allows the data owner to define their access policy along with their attributes then it encapsulates the attributes with the cryptographic parameters and keeps it under the control of attribute authority. As a second fold, to enhance the data interaction process within the system entities a secured channel is created using a public key crypto system. In our model, we encrypted every attribute of the user against a unique private key component, hence spooling of known attribute yields no results to the adversaries. The proposed model remains owner centric, by granting permission to the data user to determine who can access what, when and where while other traditional models fail to achieve this. The confidentiality threshold has been increased by validating the data origin and accessing entity by using robust cryptographic methodology. Our model is designed to offer low overhead and high secure platform to share the data between the data owner and accessing entities. The protocol uses a distributed approach by creating independent authorities thus increasing the system efficiency. The proposed security protocol has been tested in a ubiquitous health care environment and the results are proved to be efficient in terms of overhead, security and spooling.

A Trust Assessment mechanism for Ubiquitous Healthcare environment employing cloud theory.

Mental healthcare domain highlights the significance of trustworthiness between patient and psychiatrist for treatment process. In this paper, the issue of assessing psychiatrist trustworthiness from patient perspective, within a Ubiquitous Healthcare (UH) environment, is addressed. To meet that challenge, a Trust Assessment mechanism mimicking human cognitive judgment, is proposed. The exploitation of innovative fuzzy-probabilistic transformation model, denoted as cloud, for mechanism deployment enables fuzziness as well as adhered randomness of cognitive perception and assessment to be captured. A set of simulations within MATLAB software environment verify the introduced mechanism efficiency.

의료 센서 네트워크에서 휴대폰을 이용한 사용자 인증 및 안전한 데이터 통신 방안

Wireless sensor network provides services anytime and anywhere they are requested. Especially, medical sensor network based on biosensors is applied a lot to biotechnology and medical engineering. In medical sensor network, people can make their health checked at home free from temporal and spatial constraints. In ubiquitous healthcare environment, people can get instant help even in the emergency, and in hospital, patients can be taken care of efficiently. In this environment, health and life related data are delivered, and the privacy and security of personal data are very important. In this paper, we propose user authentication and data communication mechanism in two modes, normal and urgent situation using cellular phone. Through our proposal, data can be transferred in quick and secure manner.

An Integrative Method on the Remote Monitoring of Walking Activity Using Ubiquitous Healthcare System

The present concept of u-Healthcare is based on treatment and recuperation and in the future it will become specialized as wellness based on prevention. It is predicted that wellness care among others will develop to become the key field of u-Healthcare. For this reason in this research, ubiquitous technology was grafted to the passometer (P-meter) which is frequently used for monitoring during existing walking exercises. Emerging from the existing method of the P-meter which simply calculates the amount of exercise by counting the number of steps taken, using the GPS incoming data, the distance and speed of the location changes is calculated and the acceleration sensor will reflect the steps and intensity of movement to measure the walking activity amount to realize a smart walker system which will help the maintenance and promotion of modernists health.In this paper, we propose an integrative remote monitoring system for measuring walking activities under ubiquitous healthcare environment considering walking effects in healthcare of human life through the calculation of the distance of location changes and speed using GPS reception data and reflecting the steps and intensity of movement using the acceleration sensor.

Evaluation of Unconstrained Monitoring Technology Used in the Smart Bed for u-Health Environment

Since ubiquitous technology is an emerging paradigm in healthcare, we wanted to evaluate its feasibility in the healthcare area. As a first step, we evaluated the feasibility of the smart bed. In this study, a series of experiments were conducted to evaluate the smart bed. Smart bed is a continuous ballistocardiogram monitoring device developed by Seoul National University. Eleven healthy subjects participated in the study. Each subject slept in the smart bed for two nights. To measure meaningful sleep periods, noisy sections were removed from the original signal. The subject's heart activity was obtained by automatic peak detection, using the AF2 peak detection algorithm. In this study, the feasibility of the smart bed was evaluated in terms of the meaningful sleep periods and the accuracy of automatic peak detection. On an average, 92.8% of sleep duration was meaningful. The accuracy of peak detection algorithm was also evaluated. The algorithm proved to have an accuracy of 95%; thus, we observe that 95% of the peak detection results were correct in comparison with the manual results. Based on the experimental results, we conclude that the smart bed can be a useful device for long-term monitoring in ubiquitous healthcare environments.

A self-scan system

A simple and cheap tactile breast self-examination system that can be used in a ubiquitous healthcare environment has been demonstrated by a team at Seoul National University in Korea. Consisting of a palm-sized wireless scanning probe, a web camera and PC software, it is able to display the location of any lumps in the breast, and define if an abnormality exists. This system can help to overcome the difficulties in tactile perception and subjective interpretation that untrained women currently face in self-examination, and its low cost and portability make it suitable for widespread use in the home.

Development of a Flexible Chest Electrode Belt for Continuous ECG Measurement

Objective: Under ubiquitous-healthcare circumstances, interest of one's health condition has been increased. People were required the measurement of biosignal by the wearable computing technology. The purpose of this paper is to measure the portable ECG (Electro- cardiogram) with the application of wearable computing technology. Therefore, the normal ECG measurement can be measured with a chest belt either in direct contract state or loose contact state. Methods: The belt type circuit for measuring ECG was developed. In order to remove noises in loosely contact condition, a shield circuit was assembled with the measuring electrodes. Both of High performance differential amplifiers and notch filters were incorporated into the main amplifier circuits. The ECG data was converted from analog to digital form by MCU (Micro Control Unit). The main memory was composed of a memory controller and a memory card. Results: The ECG measurement having bad electrode contact to body would be usually done in daily life, so we measured the biosignal by using the loose contact potable belt for accurate ECG data. The belt can be used to measure ECG by loose contact method. Conclusion: In this study, we could measure ECG without any spatial-temporal restriction due to the portable belt. This device is suitable for the ubiquitous-healthcare environment.