Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In (Salvador, Carrasco & de Mingo, 2005) a
platform is presented which is built around three
information entities: patient, health-care agent, and
central station. It is designed to enable patients
with chronic heart diseases (in stable condition;
emergency situations were excluded deliberately)
to complete specifically defined protocols for out-
of-hospital follow-up and monitoring. Patients
belong to one of four specific risk groups: arte-
rial hypertension, malignant arrhythmias, heart
failure, and post-infarction rehabilitation. They
are provided with portable recording equipment
and a cellular phone that supported data trans-
mission (electrocardiogram (ECG)) and wireless
application protocol (WAP). Another work is
presented in (Rialle, 2003), where a new research
methodology and a system for continuous medical
follow-up of patients at home is presented. This
work is a contribution to the general issue of aiding
people staying at home. In (Lin, Jan &Ko, 2004)
a mobile patient monitoring system is proposed,
which integrates current personal digital assistant
(PDA) and WLAN technologies. At the patient's
location, a wireless PDA-based monitor is used
to acquire continuously the patient's vital signs,
including heart rate, three-lead electrocardiogra-
phy, etc. Furthermore, (Lee, Chen & Lin, 2000)
describes a platform based on a hybrid fibre co-
axial (HFC) network, which is designed to make
a home telecare system feasible. The aim of this
home telecare system is to combine biomedical
data, including three-channel ECG and blood
pressure (BP), video, and audio into a National
Television Standard Committee (NTSC) chan-
nel for communication between the patient and
healthcare provider. Another research initiative is
proposed by F. Hu and S. Kumar in (Hu & Kumar,
2006) for a mobile sensor network infrastructure
to support the third-generation telemedicine ap-
plications. An energy-efficient query resolution
mechanism in large-scale mobile sensor networks
is used for critical medical data collections. In
order to provide the guaranteed mobile QoS for
arriving multimedia calls, a new multi-class call
admission control mechanism is discussed, which
is based on dynamically forming a reservation
pool for handoff requests. M. Engin et al. (Engin,
Yamaner & Engin, 2005) propose a prototype
telemedicine system, which provides human ECG
signals transfer via a mobile phone. This system
covers also the management of electronic records
of patient and access to databases on the hospital
side. A new structure of a generic contact centre
and an implementation on interactive exchange of
messages and data through a mobile WAP phone
is presented in (Maglaveras, 2002). It is shown,
that this type of technology gives promising
results and the interactivity level is introduced
which is especially necessary for patients with
chronic diseases. In (LaMonte, Xiao & Hu,
2004),
LaMonte
has designed, built, and tested a
mobile telemedicine system (MTS), which was
aimed for treatment of patients with acute stroke
into the prehospital phase of care. The described
approach may be useful to combat a main deter-
rent to rapid treatment: delay in the evaluation
time of medical systems. Two main components
of the latter problem are stressed. The first one
is inaccessibility of a stroke specialist within a
brief therapeutic window. The second one is the
need of having the capability to test and deliver
effective stroke therapeutics inside the ambulance.
QUALITY OF SERVICE IN MOBILE
HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS
Quality of Service is the ability to provide certain
priorities to different classes of e-health applica-
tions, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a cer-
tain level of performance to a data flow such as
a required bit rate, delay, jitter, packet dropping
probability and/or bit error rate. Its guarantees are
important if the network capacity is insufficient.
For real-time streaming multimedia applications
such as voice over IP and IP-TV, fixed bit rate is
often required. Such applications are sensitive
to delays and also capacity is a limited resource,
Search WWH ::
Custom Search