Ubiquitous Health Monitoring Research Articles

A Trusted Ubiquitous Healthcare Monitoring System for Hospital Environment

Wireless Body Sensor Network with wearable and implantable body sensors have been grabbing lot of interests among the researchers and healthcare service providers. These sensors forward physiological data to the personnel at the hospital, doctor or caretaker anytime, anywhere; hence the name of the network is Ubiquitous health monitoring system. The technology has brought Internet of Things into this system making it to get connected to the cloud based internet. This has made the retrieval of information to the expert and thus improving the happiness of elderly people and patients suffering from chronic diseases. This paper focuses on creating an android based application for monitoring patients in hospital environment. The necessity of sharing hospital data to the experts around the globe has brought the necessity of trust in Health care systems. The data sharing in the IOT environment is secured. The environment is tested in real-time cloud environment. The proposed android application serves to be better architecture for hospital monitoring.

Exploiting smart e-Health gateways at the edge of healthcare Internet-of-Things: A fog computing approach

Current developments in ICTs such as in Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS) allow us to develop healthcare solutions with more intelligent and prediction capabilities both for daily life (home/office) and in-hospitals. In most of IoT-based healthcare systems, especially at smart homes or hospitals, a bridging point (i.e., gateway) is needed between sensor infrastructure network and the Internet. The gateway at the edge of the network often just performs basic functions such as translating between the protocols used in the Internet and sensor networks. These gateways have beneficial knowledge and constructive control over both the sensor network and the data to be transmitted through the Internet. In this paper, we exploit the strategic position of such gateways at the edge of the network to offer several higher-level services such as local storage, real-time local data processing, embedded data mining, etc., presenting thus a Smart e-Health Gateway. We then propose to exploit the concept of Fog Computing in Healthcare IoT systems by forming a Geo-distributed intermediary layer of intelligence between sensor nodes and Cloud. By taking responsibility for handling some burdens of the sensor network and a remote healthcare center, our Fog-assisted system architecture can cope with many challenges in ubiquitous healthcare systems such as mobility, energy efficiency, scalability, and reliability issues. A successful implementation of Smart e-Health Gateways can enable massive deployment of ubiquitous health monitoring systems especially in clinical environments. We also present a prototype of a Smart e-Health Gateway called UT-GATE where some of the discussed higher-level features have been implemented. We also implement an IoT-based Early Warning Score (EWS) health monitoring to practically show the efficiency and relevance of our system on addressing a medical case study. Our proof-of-concept design demonstrates an IoT-based health monitoring system with enhanced overall system intelligence, energy efficiency, mobility, performance, interoperability, security, and reliability.

Closed-Loop Control of Humidification for Artifact Reduction in Capacitive ECG Measurements.

Recording biosignals without the need for direct skin contact offers new opportunities for ubiquitous health monitoring. Electrodes with capacitive coupling have been shown to be suitable for the monitoring of electrical potentials on the body surface, in particular ECG. However, due to triboelectric charge generation and motion artifacts, signal and thus diagnostic quality is inferior to galvanic coupling. Active closed-loop humidification of capacitive electrodes is proposed in this work as a new concept to improve signal quality. A capacitive ECG recording system integrated into a common car seat is presented. It can regulate the micro climate at the interface of electrode and patient by actively dispensing water vapour and monitoring humidity in a closed-loop approach. As a regenerative water reservoir, silica gel is used. The system was evaluated with respect to subjective and objective ECG signal quality. Active humidification was found to have a significant positive effect in case of previously poor quality. Also, it had no diminishing effect in case of already good signal quality.

Study on Wireless Body Area Network in Health Monitoring

One of the most promising approaches in building wearable health monitoring systems utilizes emerging wireless body area network shortly called as wireless body area network. A wireless body area network consists of multiple sensor nodes, each node is capable of sampling, processing, and communicating one or more vital signs which includes heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, activity or environmental parameters which includes location, temperature, humidity, light. Typically these sensors are placed strategically on the human body as tiny patches or hidden in user's clothes allowing ubiquitous health monitoring in their native environment for extended periods of time. It offers the freedom of mobility and enhances the quality of life for the patient. Wearable systems for health monitoring come in a number of forms and serve a variety of applications. Available systems range from those serving personal fitness and wellness management to those serving to provide remote monitoring or diagnostic of cardiovascular problems. A number of research programs are pursuing development of health monitoring systems as well.

An Efficient Activity Recognition Framework: Toward Privacy-Sensitive Health Data Sensing

Recent advances in wireless sensor networks for ubiquitous health and activity monitoring systems have triggered the possibility of addressing human needs in smart environments through recognizing human real-time activities. While the nature of streams in such networks requires efficient recognition techniques, it is also subject to suspicious inference-based privacy attacks. In this paper, we propose a framework that efficiently recognizes human activities in smart homes based on spatiotemporal mining technique. In addition, we propose a technique to enhance the privacy of the collected human sensed activities using a modified version of micro-aggregation approach. An extensive validation of our framework has been performed on benchmark data sets yielding quite promising results in terms of accuracy and privacy-utility tradeoff.

A Secure Data Authentication in Wireless Body Area Network for Health Monitoring Using Electrocardiogram-Based Key Agreement

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) comprises of a set of biomedical sensors, which are implanted into or placed around a human body to serve a variety of network applications constantly. One of the applications, the ubiquitous health monitoring, has improved the ability of healthcare providers to deliver appropriate treatments to the patients either in hospitals or at homes. As the need of this application increases, several security issues also arise due to the nature of open wireless medium. Moreover, implementing an effective security mechanism uses a significant part of the available energy in a WBAN, whereby the sensors have limited resource constraints in terms of power consumption and memory space. Thus, this paper presents a new authentication protocol model that utilizes Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal as biometric as well as cryptographic key to ensure that the transmitted data are originated from the required WBAN. Due to the uniqueness and the permanence property of ECG signal, the proposed model is developed to achieve optimal security performance and required lightweight manners of to the resource-limited biomedical sensors. The simulation system is implemented based on the process of an improved fuzzy vault scheme with a new error correction algorithm, which results in reducing computational complexity, communication load and storage overhead when compared to several previous work. Copyright © 2016 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved.

An Experimental Performance Evaluation and Compatibility Study of the Bluetooth Low Energy Based Platform for ECG Monitoring in WBANs

A long term healthcare monitoring system requires battery operated devices with low-power technologies. Researchers tried to adapt various short-range technologies for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) in ubiquitous health monitoring. The classical Bluetooth is known for its greedy power consumption, IrDA and NFC require line-of-sight conditions, and ANT has weak coexistence features and interference issues. A typical choice remains ZigBee/6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4 based solutions in WBANs because of their low-power consumption. However, the recently proposed Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) announced more compelling features in various aspects. Only few studies have been published supporting these claims on BLE. In this paper, we present a BLE based remote healthcare monitoring platform and we study its compatibility for ECG monitoring. ECG data requires continuous and real-time transmissions, making it particularly challenging for resource constrained devices. In our system, a BLE112 module from Bluegiga and a BLE USB dongle are used for WBAN. The performance of the system is evaluated experimentally and the results showed good potential of this proposed BLE platform in meeting the main QoS requirements of medical applications in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet error rate, while staying energy efficient.

A Study on the Optimal Positions of ECG Electrodes in a Garment for the Design of ECG-Monitoring Clothing for Male.

Smart clothing is a sort of wearable device used for ubiquitous health monitoring. It provides comfort and efficiency in vital sign measurements and has been studied and developed in various types of monitoring platforms such as T-shirt and sports bra. However, despite these previous approaches, smart clothing for electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring has encountered a serious shortcoming relevant to motion artifacts caused by wearer movement. In effect, motion artifacts are one of the major problems in practical implementation of most wearable health-monitoring devices. In the ECG measurements collected by a garment, motion artifacts are usually caused by improper location of the electrode, leading to lack of contact between the electrode and skin with body motion. The aim of this study was to suggest a design for ECG-monitoring clothing contributing to reduction of motion artifacts. Based on the clothing science theory, it was assumed in this study that the stability of the electrode in a dynamic state differed depending on the electrode location in an ECG-monitoring garment. Founded on this assumption, effects of 56 electrode positions were determined by sectioning the surface of the garment into grids with 6cm intervals in the front and back of the bodice. In order to determine the optimal locations of the ECG electrodes from the 56 positions, ECG measurements were collected from 10 participants at every electrode position in the garment while the wearer was in motion. The electrode locations indicating both an ECG measurement rate higher than 80.0% and a large amplitude during motion were selected as the optimal electrode locations. The results of this analysis show four electrode locations with consistently higher ECG measurement rates and larger amplitudes amongst the 56 locations. These four locations were abstracted to be least affected by wearer movement in this research. Based on this result, a design of the garment-formed ECG monitoring platform reflecting the optimal positions of the electrode was suggested.

Design and Validation of Android Based Wireless Integrated Device for Ubiquitous Health Monitoring

Mobile wireless technologies have become more favourable for ubiquitous healthcare nowadays to provide healthcare services anytime anywhere. This paper presents Android based integrated wireless smart device and a mobile monitoring terminal to observe and analyze real time health parameters such as saturated percentage of oxygen (SpO2), heart rate and skin temperature. The device is designed and implemented using a microcontroller platform for primary processing of data and wireless communication is done through Bluetooth protocol. The developed system is clinically useful and user friendly due to its compact size, cost effectiveness, wearability and can be used widely in hospitals for post operative care, home healthcare, community healthcare and sports training. The experimental results illustrate that the mean absolute percentage error of prototype device is 0.75 % for SpO2, 1.58 % for heart rate and 0.66 % for skin temperature measurement. Correlation coefficient is also calculated to find the linear association between the standard and prototype device.

Measurement Issues in Galvanic Intrabody Communication: Influence of Experimental Setup.

The need for increasingly energy-efficient and miniaturized bio-devices for ubiquitous health monitoring has paved the way for considerable advances in the investigation of techniques such as intrabody communication (IBC), which uses human tissues as a transmission medium. However, IBC still poses technical challenges regarding the measurement of the actual gain through the human body. The heterogeneity of experimental setups and conditions used together with the inherent uncertainty caused by the human body make the measurement process even more difficult. The objective of this study, focused on galvanic coupling IBC, is to study the influence of different measurement equipments and conditions on the IBC channel. Different experimental setups have been proposed in order to analyze key issues such as grounding, load resistance, type of measurement device and effect of cables. In order to avoid the uncertainty caused by the human body, an IBC electric circuit phantom mimicking both human bioimpedance and gain has been designed. Given the low-frequency operation of galvanic coupling, a frequency range between 10 kHz and 1 MHz has been selected. The correspondence between simulated and experimental results obtained with the electric phantom have allowed us to discriminate the effects caused by the measurement equipment. This study has helped us obtain useful considerations about optimal setups for galvanic-type IBC as well as to identify some of the main causes of discrepancy in the literature.

Body Sensor Network for Ubiquitous Health Monitoring

A body sensor network system has been developed for ubiquitous health monitoring of multiple mobile subjects, which is referred to as UbiHealth. On the body, there are micro-sensors to capture physiological signals of electrocardiography (ECG), blood pressure, respiration and temperature, as well as context information of activity and position. Sensors are coordinated by an on-body gateway, where data are collected, pre-processed and wirelessly sent to the server. The server receives, stores and processes signals from multiple gateways, providing overview of those subjects on a local map, and real-time health status of individual subjects. The application scenarios include, for example, health monitoring for rescue team members in a hazard, and elderly health monitoring in a community.

QoE-based optimal resource allocation in wireless healthcare networks: opportunities and challenges

Ubiquitous health monitoring is a mobile health service with the aim of monitoring patients' conditions anytime and anywhere by collecting and transferring biosignal data from patients to health-service providers (e.g., healthcare centers). As a critical issue in ubiquitous health monitoring, wireless resource allocation can influence the performance of health monitoring, and the majority of work in wireless resource allocation for health monitoring has focused on quality-of-service oriented allocation schemes with primary challenges at the physical and MAC layers. Recently, quality-of-experience (QoE) oriented resource allocation schemes in wireless health monitoring have attracted attentions as a promising design to a better service of healthcare monitoring. In this paper, we overview the metrics of assessing the quality of medical images, and discuss the performance of these metrics in QoE-oriented resource allocation for health monitoring. We start with addressing the state-of-the-art QoE metrics by providing a taxonomy of the different metrics employed in assessing medical images. We then present the design of resource allocation schemes for health monitoring. After that, we present a case study to compare the performance of different classes of metrics in designing resource allocation schemes. We end the paper with a few open issues in the design of novel QoE metrics for resource allocation in health monitoring.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in cloud- assisted wireless body area networks: a systematic literature review.

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology that has shown enormous potential in improving the quality of healthcare, and has thus found a broad range of medical applications from ubiquitous health monitoring to emergency medical response systems. The huge amount of highly sensitive data collected and generated by WBAN nodes requires an ascendable and secure storage and processing infrastructure. Given the limited resources of WBAN nodes for storage and processing, the integration of WBANs and cloud computing may provide a powerful solution. However, despite the benefits of cloud-assisted WBAN, several security issues and challenges remain. Among these, data availability is the most nagging security issue. The most serious threat to data availability is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that directly affects the all-time availability of a patient's data. The existing solutions for standalone WBANs and sensor networks are not applicable in the cloud. The purpose of this review paper is to identify the most threatening types of DDoS attacks affecting the availability of a cloud-assisted WBAN and review the state-of-the-art detection mechanisms for the identified DDoS attacks.

Logic-centered architecture for ubiquitous health monitoring.

One of the key points to maintain and boost research and development in the area of smart wearable systems (SWS) is the development of integrated architectures for intelligent services, as well as wearable systems and devices for health and wellness management. This paper presents such a generic architecture for multiparametric, intelligent and ubiquitous wireless sensing platforms. It is a transparent, smartphone-based sensing framework with customizable wireless interfaces and plug'n'play capability to easily interconnect third party sensor devices. It caters to wireless body, personal, and near-me area networks. A pivotal part of the platform is the integrated inference engine/runtime environment that allows the mobile device to serve as a user-adaptable personal health assistant. The novelty of this system lays in a rapid visual development and remote deployment model. The complementary visual Inference Engine Editor that comes with the package enables artificial intelligence specialists, alongside with medical experts, to build data processing models by assembling different components and instantly deploying them (remotely) on patient mobile devices. In this paper, the new logic-centered software architecture for ubiquitous health monitoring applications is described, followed by a discussion as to how it helps to shift focus from software and hardware development, to medical and health process-centered design of new SWS applications.

Biosignals Sensing by Novel Use of Bidirectional Microphones in a Mobile Phone for Ubiquitous Healthcare Monitoring

This paper describes a novel application of the bidirectional audio microphones in mobile phones to measure biosignals for ubiquitous health monitoring. The bidirectional microphone has two pressure-detecting ports. A pressure-detecting film receives the differential pressure between the ports. We apply this idea to biosignal measurements for a mobile phone. We used the microphone as 1) a sphygmograph at the fingertip, 2) a stethoscope in which a delay time sensor of pulse wave arrivals from the neck near the carotid or chest near the heart to the fingertip, and 3) a bed sensing device for biosignals. When used as a sphygmograph, it detects the wave similar to the second derivative of the conventional optical pulse oxymeter output wave. When used as a stethoscope, it detects cardiac sound and the pulse wave and respiration. With two microphones, the delay time from the neck carotid to the fingertip is detected.

Monitoring activities of daily living based on wearable wireless body sensor network.

With recent advances in microprocessor chip technology, wireless communication, and biomedical engineering it is possible to develop miniaturized ubiquitous health monitoring devices that are capable of recording physiological and movement signals during daily life activities. The aim of the research is to implement and test the prototype of health monitoring system. The system consists of the body central unit with Bluetooth module and wearable sensors: the custom-designed ECG sensor, the temperature sensor, the skin humidity sensor and accelerometers placed on the human body or integrated with clothes and a network gateway to forward data to a remote medical server. The system includes custom-designed transmission protocol and remote web-based graphical user interface for remote real time data analysis. Experimental results for a group of humans who performed various activities (eg. working, running, etc.) showed maximum 5% absolute error compared to certified medical devices. The results are promising and indicate that developed wireless wearable monitoring system faces challenges of multi-sensor human health monitoring during performing daily activities and opens new opportunities in developing novel healthcare services.

Ubiquitous health monitoring and real-time cardiac arrhythmias detection: a case study

As the symptoms and signs of heart diseases that cause sudden cardiac death, cardiac arrhythmia has attracted great attention. Due to limitations in time and space, traditional approaches to cardiac arrhythmias detection fail to provide a real-time continuous monitoring and testing service applicable in different environmental conditions. Integrated with the latest technologies in ECG (electrocardiograph) analysis and medical care, the pervasive computing technology makes possible the ubiquitous cardiac care services, and thus brings about new technical challenges, especially in the formation of cardiac care architecture and realization of the real-time automatic ECG detection algorithm dedicated to care devices. In this paper, a ubiquitous cardiac care prototype system is presented with its architecture framework well elaborated. This prototype system has been tested and evaluated in all the clinical-/home-/outdoor-care modes with a satisfactory performance in providing real-time continuous cardiac arrhythmias monitoring service unlimitedly adaptable in time and space.

PhysioDroid: combining wearable health sensors and mobile devices for a ubiquitous, continuous, and personal monitoring.

Technological advances on the development of mobile devices, medical sensors, and wireless communication systems support a new generation of unobtrusive, portable, and ubiquitous health monitoring systems for continuous patient assessment and more personalized health care. There exist a growing number of mobile apps in the health domain; however, little contribution has been specifically provided, so far, to operate this kind of apps with wearable physiological sensors. The PhysioDroid, presented in this paper, provides a personalized means to remotely monitor and evaluate users' conditions. The PhysioDroid system provides ubiquitous and continuous vital signs analysis, such as electrocardiogram, heart rate, respiration rate, skin temperature, and body motion, intended to help empower patients and improve clinical understanding. The PhysioDroid is composed of a wearable monitoring device and an Android app providing gathering, storage, and processing features for the physiological sensor data. The versatility of the developed app allows its use for both average users and specialists, and the reduced cost of the PhysioDroid puts it at the reach of most people. Two exemplary use cases for health assessment and sports training are presented to illustrate the capabilities of the PhysioDroid. Next technical steps include generalization to other mobile platforms and health monitoring devices.

User-centric privacy-preserving statistical analysis of ubiquitous health monitoring data

In this paper, we propose a user-centric software architecture for managing Ubiquitous Health Monitoring Data (UHMD) generated from wearable sensors in a Ubiquitous Health Monitoring System (UHMS), and examine how these data can be used within privacy-preserving distributed statistical analysis. Two are the main goals of our approach. First, to enhance the privacy of patients. Second, to decongest the Health Monitoring Center (HMC) from the enormous amount of biomedical data generated by the users? wearable sensors. In our solution personal software agents are used to receive and manage the personal medical data of their owners. Moreover, the personal agents can support privacy-preserving distributed statistical analysis of the health data. To this end, we present a cryptographic protocol based on secure multi-party computations that accept as input current or archived values of users? wearable sensors. We describe a prototype implementation that performs a statistical analysis on a community of independent personal agents. Finally, experiments with up to several hundred agents confirm the viability and the effectiveness of our approach.

Multi-Channel Framework for Body Area Network in Health Monitoring

Increasing use of wireless networks has empowered the facility of ubiquitous health monitoring especially in advanced countries. Various small devices are attached to human body forming personalized wireless body area network (WBAN). These small devices interact with each other using different radios and antennas sc hemes proposed by many researchers around the globe. However, most of these schemes are facing problem of inefficiency due to fading and shadowing effects. We propose a novel multi-radio multi- channel framework for efficient communication among devices in WBAN. The focus of this research is to ensure energy efficient and reliable communication in WBAN.