UWB and mmWave Communication Techniques and Systems for Healthcare - Ultra-Wideband and 60 GHz Communications for Biomedical Applications - page 4

potential of mmWaves for eHealth and mHealth applications, especially for high
data rate diagnostic systems. We also propose a specific, assisted-living applica-
tion for communicative impaired children, which has been conceived within the
project VISION [ 7 ]. The idea came because cognitive behavioural systems would
definitely benefit from a supporting technology able to automatically recognize the
context where humans operate, their gestures and even facial expressions. This can
be achieved through a supporting infrastructure able to capture a huge amount of
information from the environment, much more than humans do, and sending it to a
processing unit able to build a representation of the context that would catch all ele-
ments necessary to interpret the specific environment. ERC project VISION [ 8 ]was
started in 2010 with the aim to develop such an innovative infrastructure to support
real-time sensing services with particular emphasis on 3D video, with mobile and
context-aware operation: 60-GHz UWB radios to enable broadband transmissions
in wireless sensor networks, a comprehensive channel model to optimize the radio
design, novel techniques to manage the huge number of nodes for ubiquitous sens-
ing, innovative tools to support the development process of intelligent services, full
cross-layer adaptability to external conditions to assure the best achievable perfor-
mance and support of QoS are the main objectives of the project VISION that can
concur to the development of future e- and m-Health mmWaves systems.
Architectures
The basic architectures of patient-centric and hospital-centric systems are shown in
Figs. 1 and 2 , respectively.
Patient-centred systems are generally characterized by a three-tier architecture
composed of: (1) body-worn or implanted sensors, with which the patient is equipped
for personal monitoring of multiple parameters, (2) a hospital information system
(HIS) for storage and management of health data, generally located in the medical
facility and (3) a mobile device that generally acts as a personal gateway between
the previous two entities. They also act as personal repository to store several users'
information (from the usual address book to electronic health records), and use algo-
rithms of data fusion, aggregation and elaboration to give a preliminary interpretation
of sensed data, serving as a personal server (PS).
In this case, event-processing middleware and expert systems have been proposed
to develop automated decision support systems (DSS) implementing thus a closed-
loop approach among the patient, doctors and the PS. The use of this kind of systems
allows the reduction of clinical checks and hospitalization costs, and the collection
of health data from different patient-centred systems represents a wide and funda-
mental source of information for the medical research in terms of statistical and
epidemiological studies.
Hospital-centred systems are designed to support medical professionals in their
activities satisfying different requirements dependent on their role and required in-
teractions. To achieve this objective, these systems have accomplished a longer
evolution than patient-centred systems having a far-off origin. Initial solutions have
been proposed to solve the problem of electronic storage of medical information to