Summary and Future Trends - Computational Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering - page 330

sensors, secure data transfer systems, reliability, and patient privacy. Consis-
tent with the topic's theme, there is an emerging requirement for CI techniques
at almost every stage of these healthcare systems.
In the following sections, we consider some of the latest CI technologies and
indicate new areas of application. There are many issues to be considered,
including ecient communication networks, challenges with biomedical sen-
sors, data transfer devices, and sensor networks.

8.3 Emerging and Future Technologies in Healthcare
8.3.1 Wireless Healthcare Systems
One emerging technology in healthcare is wireless communications to link
monitoring devices and systems to the patient (Figure 8.2). The fundamental
concept is to deploy wireless networks of medical devices to reduce healthcare
costs and address the shortage of medical staff in industrialized countries

Hospital decisions support systems

−

Physicians and nurses

Filter service

Circuit

Circuit

Circuit

Compression Aggregation

Hourglass
data-collection network

Sensor entry
point (SEP)
Patient sensors

Sensor entry
point (SEP)

EMTs with handheld PDAs

FIGURE 8.2
A wireless sensor network for healthcare. (From Gaynor, M., Moulton, S. L.,
Welsh, M., et al., IEEE Internet Computing, 8(4), 32-39, 2004. c IEEE.)