A Pervasive Healthcare Testbed for Optimized Monitoring of Medical Data Services
Motivation and Need
Daily activities in healthcare consist of a multitude of highly complex processes. This complexity is caused by several factors, e.g. by the number of stakeholders involved (physicians, nursing staff, administrative staff, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies etc.), the number of tools used, the exchange of information and the interplay of different processes. Currently, most of the clinical processes are designed and controlled in an ad-hoc way. The high population growth, lack of appropriate medical health services, unavailability of consultants and specialists, lack of guidance and supervision of the patients has led to chaotic healthcare system in Pakistan resulting in poor healthcare services.
A healthcare monitoring system should monitor medical data such as body temperature, blood pressure, electrocardiogram, electromyogram, heart rate, breathing rate and transmit it to a medical centre, where these data are used for health status monitoring, medical analysis and emergency treatments. It needs to guarantee that the packets having time critical data that can be sensed and delivered to a medical centre reliably and efficiently within the delay bonds. Time critical data flows in medical scenarios handle data according to time constraints associated with the flow and the urgency of the data. It requires an efficient data priority assignment and scheduling mechanism to accomplish this task. It also needs continuous monitoring of network conditions to use an optimal path for data delivery. There is a strong need of a deployable prototype to resolve healthcare challenges in Pakistan providing real-time continuous monitoring, quality of life, knowledge base for effective analysis and prediction, and seamless integration with existing healthcare standards.
Role of industrial partner
The Medicare Hospital (Pvt) Limited, has in place all the resources, space, IT equipment, and medical staff, required for the prototyping and testing the systems. Dr. Mehdi Hasan Mumtaz, Professor of Intensive Care, Medical director, CEO will assist the research team in the development and deployment of the project at the hospital facility. This has been clearly spelled out in the proposal as well.
Impact on the masses
- Improving quality of life of patients by deploying proposed healthcare system in public and private hospitals across Pakistan.
- An efficient remote and real-time health-monitoring prototype will improve day-to-day healthcare flows in hospital across Pakistan, where healthcare system in government and private sector is already under stress due to time-consuming procedures and lack of ICT infrastructure.
- Provision of timely response in critical medical urgencies.
- Predicts healthcare plans and disease trends.
- will lead towards commercializing this product.
Development Tasks
Following are the main developmental tasks of the proposed project
- Configuration of MICA2 Motes
- Simulation and evaluation of the proposed system
- A working prototype (along with GUI and code) for Information sharing such as X-rays, MRI, CAT scans etc.
- Implementation of the proposed Healthcare system on MICA2 Motes
- Healthcare System Prototype (with GUI and code)
- Routing protocol for effective routing (with simulation code)
- Evaluation Results and optimized integrated system
- A working module for Priority Assignment (with code)
- A working module (with GUI and code) for remote patient monitoring. This will also include a mobile application.
- Test results of Performance testing
- A working module for Knowledge Base (with GUI and code)
- A working Module generating Medical Ontologies (with GUI and code)
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- Final Demonstration of the working prototype including all the functionalities in a real time
GOALS
- To provide an efficient remote health-monitoring system for deployment in hospitals. This will improve day-to-day healthcare flows in hospital across Pakistan, where healthcare system in government and private sector is already under stress due to time-consuming procedures and lack of ICT infrastructure.
- To provide timely responses in critical medical urgencies.
- To accurately predicts healthcare plans and disease trends.
- To provide the successful implementation and testing of the healthcare system leading towards commercialization of this product.
- To take a first step towards building a national health database that may be used in policy making for health sector in Pakistan.