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can then be transmitted from the ambulance or
patient's home to a trauma centre, special unit or
even an on-call specialist at home. Photographs of
the patient or trauma scenes can be incorporated.
All this should enable better decisions to be made
about the future care of the patient including
whether one of the following is appropriate to:
of the services. One of the main characteristics of
the telemedicine networks is absence of central
coordination among users due to the different
nature of applications and services.
The following features define not only charac-
teristics of technology based healthcare services
but also their “self-organisation”:
Care at home;
• If a network has a certain structure and
functionality - this network is organised by
the set of rules (in case of using wireless
technologies) (Camazine, Deneubourg &
Frank, 2001);
• A network is self-organised if a central
control unit is absent (due to the diverse
nature of services and providers);
Adaptability. If any change within a “self-
organised” network occurs, for instance
failure, the overall system reacts to changes
by the adaptive learning algorithm (system
properties) in a coordinated manner. This
makes the global system robust to failures.
If one happens, an external help is not re-
quired because the system can cope with
the consequences itself. This makes global
self-organised system flexible.
Scalability . An important feature of a self-
organised system is its scalability. Within
the global and local medical environment
the number of sensors can vary rapidly.
Transfer or referral to a local minor inju-
ries unit;
Transfer to trauma centre;
Transfer to a specialist unit such as a
Coronary Care Unit (CCU) in a local
District General Hospital (DGH);
Transfer to a specialist tertiary facility (e.g.
neurosurgery or burns). If a transfer is in-
volved, the information can also enable the
receiving unit to be fully prepared to take
are for the patient.
Within the wireless metropolitan area health-
care network one of the effective access tech-
nologies of the information transfer is guaranteed
by IEEE 802.16 standard. In (Niyato, Hossain
& Diamond, 2007), the application of IEEE
802.16-based broadband wireless access (BWA)
technology to telemedicine services and the related
protocol engineering issues are investigated. A
literature review on the design and implementa-
tion of current wireless telemedicine systems is
presented in (Niyato, Hossain & Diamond, 2007).
A new resource allocation scheme and admission
control framework in IEEE 802.16/WiMAX-based
wireless mobile telemedicine systems is proposed
and tested by simulations.
Advances of self-organisation and its proper-
ties have been studied by many researchers (Pre-
hofer & Bettster, 2005; Dorogovtsev & Mendez,
2009) and cover subjects such as self-organising
neural networks, swarm intelligence, economy,
brain theory and various social types of networks
(Newman, 2003). In these examples the partici-
pating entities do not require centralised control,
but react on changes in their local environment.
“Self-organisation” is widely applied also in
telecommunication technologies. An example of
self-organisation into the communication systems
is the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
METHODOLOGY FOR
DESIGNING THE E-HEALTH
NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
The 'design' process of the e-Health network
architecture starts with the study of the properties
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