Study of Zero Velocity Update for Both Low- and High-Speed Human Activities

Previous studies show that inertial sensor-based personal positioning benefited from Zero Velocity Update (ZUPT) method by resetting the foot speed at every foot step. However, only the solution for normal pedestrian movement with small velocity like walking was given. This paper presents a novel ZUPT system which can be used in a wide range of human activities, including walking, running, and stair climbing by using two inertial measurement unit (IMU) modules. One is attached on the centre of the human body for human activities’ classification and recognition. The other one is mounted on the foot for ZUPT algorithm implementation based on the result of activities’ recognition. Test cases include stair climbing by walking and running, walking, fast walking, and running. In all cases, most of the steps are able to be detected and the new ZUPT system can be successfully implemented.

Design Considerations for Delivering E-Learning to Surgical Trainees

Challenges remain in leveraging e-health technologies for continuous medical education/professional development. This study examines the interface design and learning process features related to the use of multimedia in providing effective support for the knowledge and practice of surgical skills. Twenty-one surgical trainees evaluated surgical content on a CD-ROM format based on 14 interface design and 11 learning process features using a questionnaire adapted from an established tool created to assess educational multimedia. Significant Spearman’s correlations were found for seven of the 14 interface design features – ‘Navigation’, ‘Learning demands’, ‘Videos’, ‘Media integration’, ‘Level of material’, ‘Information presentation’ and ‘Overall functionality’, explaining ratings of the learning process. The interplay of interface design and learning process features of educational multimedia highlight key design considerations in e-learning. An understanding of these features is relevant to the delivery of surgical training, reflecting the current state of the art in transferring static CD-ROM content to the dynamic web or creating CD/web hybrid models of education.

Malaria Parasite Detection

Healthcare Delivery Systems are becoming overloaded in developing countries like India and China. It is imperative that more efficient and cost effective processes are employed. One such requirement is the automatic detection of malaria parasites in stained blood smears. Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease. Each year Malaria kills between one and three million people. The most conventional and gold standard test for the confirmation of the Malarial diagnosis is the peripheral blood smear examination. The paper investigates and develops an automated malaria diagnostic system based on the color image processing using Hue, Saturation & Intensity (HSI) model. The algorithm is designed to identify only parasites inside red blood cells (erythrocytes) to avoid false positive results. The work-flow process has enabled practical tele-pathology by allowing e-collaboration between lesser skilled technicians in rural areas and experts in urban areas, cutting down the total turnaround time for diagnosing malaria from days to minutes.

A Prototype Agent Based Model and Machine Learning Hybrid System for Healthcare Decision Support

Science is on the verge of practical agent based modeling decision support systems capable of machine learning for healthcare policy decision support. The details of integrating an agent based model of a hospital emergency department with a genetic programming machine learning system are presented in this paper. A novel GP heuristic or extension is introduced to better represent the Markov Decision Process that underlies agent decision making in an unknown environment. The capabilities of the resulting prototype for automated hypothesis generation within the context of healthcare policy decision support are demonstrated by automatically generating patient flow and infection spread prevention policies. Finally, some observations are made regarding moving forward from the prototype stage.

Research Essay

Some online health information and services have the potential to mislead, confuse or create unnecessary anxiety and more should be done to help people find trustworthy health websites and use online health services safely and effectively, says a new report on the ethics of ‘personalised healthcare’ (Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2010). In September 2008, the UK Nuffield Council on Bioethics established a Working Party to consider the ethical issues raised by developments in medical profiling and online medicine that promise more ‘personalised healthcare’. The resulting report, published in October 2010, makes a number of policy and practice recommendations for providers and users of e-health services. This article highlights the recommendations made in three of the report’s e-health case studies: online health information, online personal health records, and telemedicine.

Development of Audio Sensing Technology for Ambient Assisted Living

One of the greatest challenges in Ambient Assisted Living is to design health smart homes that anticipate the needs of its inhabitant while maintaining their safety and comfort. It is thus essential to ease the interaction with the smart home through systems that naturally react to voice command using microphones rather than tactile interfaces. However, efficient audio analysis in such noisy environment is a challenging task. In this paper, a real-time audio analysis system, the AuditHIS system, devoted to audio analysis in smart home environment is presented. AuditHIS has been tested thought three experiments carried out in a smart home that are detailed. The results show the difficulty of the task and serve as basis to discuss the stakes and the challenges of this promising technology in the domain of AAL.

Applications of Policy Based Agents in Wireless Body Sensor Mesh Networks for Patient Health Monitoring

Considerable research interest in using wireless and mobile technologies in patient health monitoring exists, particularly in hospitals and nursing homes. For health monitoring, an intelligent agent based hierarchical architecture was presented in the authors’ previous work. The technique of monitoring and notifying the health of patients using an intelligent agent, to the concerned hospital personnel, was proposed. This paper presents the details of the functioning of four main intelligent agents, i.e., the nurse agent, the sensor agent, the database agent, and the ward boy agent, for intimating the health information to the concerned doctor in the hospital, based on certain policies relevant to the hospital. The policies worked based on the temperature parameter monitored by the nurse agent. This paper considers an example of the physiological parameter i.e., the body temperature monitoring, for policy based agent implementation. The implementation was carried out using JADE-LEAP agent development kit.

Pervasive Computing Support in the Transition towards Personalised Health Systems

This paper discusses pervasive computing work in the transition from traditional health care programs to personalised health systems (pHealth). A chronological guided transition survey is discussed to highlight trends in medicine describing their most recent developments about health care systems. Future trends in this interdisciplinary techno-medical area are described as research goals. Particularly, research and technological efforts concerning ICT’s and pervasive computing in healthcare and medical applications are presented to identify systems requirements supporting secure and reliable networks and services. The main objectives are to summarise both the pHealth systems requirements providing end-user applications and the necessary pervasive computing support to interconnect device-based health care applications and distributed information data systems in secure and reliable forms, highlighting the role pervasive computing plays in this process. A generic personalised healthcare scheme is introduced to provide guidance in the transition and can be used for multiple medical and health applications. An example is briefly introduced by using the generic scheme proposed.

Proposed Framework for the Deployment of Telemedicine Centers in Rural Bangladesh

This paper presents a unique and comprehensive framework for the deployment of effective telemedicine centers in diverse locations in Bangladesh. The framework employs a top-down analysis and design approach by properly organizing the key elements comprising it. The elements include a nationwide analysis of demographics along with current healthcare scenario as well location-specific pre-deployment studies and the recommended telemedicine solution. This framework will be a valuable guide to deploy effective and long-term telemedicine center at any given location. Towards this goal, the paper presents the framework along with a detailed discussion of the constituent elements, and analyzes several case studies to demonstrate the application of the framework to provide site-specific telemedicine solutions at some selected test sites. All the previous telemedicine projects in Bangladesh suffered from a lack of sustainability and it is expected that deployments based on the proposed framework will be effective, scalable, and long-lasting in bringing e-healthcare to the target population in Bangladesh.

Acquisition of Multiple Physiological Parameters During Physical Exercise

This paper describes the experimental method focused on the acquisition of various physiological parameters during different effort levels of physical exercise like walking and running at several velocities. The study involved 57 young and adult people, 43 male and 14 female (24,37±5,96 years), from which 48 were soldiers belonging to the Infantry Regiment n.° 13 (RI13) of the Portuguese Army and 9 were teachers or college students of Sport Sciences, physically active but not competitive. The experimental measures provide a set of information that offers insight about the health status and physical performance of the subjects during exercise. This experimental method procedure is suited for the acquisition of physiological parameters with both the wireless physiological data acquisition systems such as the bioPlux and the respiratory analyzer gas systems such as Cosmed K4b2.The data was collected to allow the definition of a model that will be used to estimate the energy expenditure of a subject using a wireless physiological data acquisition system, which is much more comfortable and suitable to monitor physical exercise in everyday use than the standard method that makes use of a respiratory gas analysis system.