A Pervasive Healthcare Testbed for Optimized Monitoring of Medical Data Services
National ICT R&D Fund, Pakistan
Project Summary
The business plan for “A Pervasive Healthcare Testbed for Optimised Monitoring of Medical Data Services, outlines the commercialization and financial details. The proposed project will not only benefit all the stakeholders but also contribute towards the knowledge economy and GDP producing good revenue. The proposal presents the development of “A Pervasive Healthcare Testbed for Optimized Monitoring of Medical Data Services” using novel optimized priority assignment mechanism. The proposed work will dynamically schedule different types of data flows based on their time critical nature. It will smartly assign priority to individual data packets rather to particular service or flow by continuously monitoring queuing delay providing guaranteed end-to-end QoS without invoking any congestion control and avoidance mechanism. The proposed Healthcare system is focused to provide quality of life in chaotic medical situations in Pakistan. The objective is to closely monitor the existing healthcare services and ICT systems, if any, in Pakistan to come up with a robust solution. The design of the proposed system consists of different modules. The remote patient-monitoring module will transmit the data to medical data centre for record keeping, interactive response, alerts, and predictive behaviour analysis. The optimized priority assignment module will forward the time critical data to the medical data centre for timely response of healthcare experts. The knowledge creation module is also part of the data centre to perform various algorithmic analysis and predictions. The medical professionals will be provided with smart handhelds equipped with interactive healthcare application for continuous monitoring, data access and control. The proposed system will not only improve the healthcare standards enhancing the quality of life of common people but will also provide opportunity for investment in the medical field by contributing towards the technological advancement. There is a great market need of such an application in Pakistan as many donor agencies are encouraging enhancements in healthcare standards through ICTs. The prototype developed as a result of this proposal can be deployed in different public and private sector hospitals meeting their needs.
Problem to be Solved
There is no standard healthcare system in Pakistan that provides the timely delivery of medical data coupled with detailed analysis and decision support system. The real-time and prioritized delivery of medical data is required to provide timely response in the both emergency and normal scenarios. A complete healthcare knowledge management system is needed to facilitate knowledge based automated care plans, prediction and analysis of medical data, real-time interactive information exchange and seamless integration involving web ontologies.
A benefit to be obtained
The proposed system will not only improve the healthcare standards enhancing the quality of life of common people but will also provide opportunity for investment in the medical field by contributing towards the technological advancement. There is a great market need of such an application in Pakistan as many donor agencies are encouraging enhancements in healthcare standards through ICTs. The prototype developed as a result of this proposal can be deployed in different public and private sector hospitals meeting their needs.
Project Product
The project product contains a test bed for comprehensive hospital data management to provide high quality and efficient healthcare using Biomedical Wireless Sensor Networks. The proposed product will not only manage human tasks but will tightly integrate a whole bundle of IT systems, activities of stakeholders at different locations and information storage at different devices. The proposed system will dynamically schedule different types of patient data based on their time critical nature. It will continuously monitor the different data flows of patients and smartly assign priority to individual data packets rather than to a particular service or flow providing end-to-end QoS
- Project Deliverables
- The project deliverables are given below:
- Hardware prototype with configured MICA2 Motes
- Healthcare system prototype
- Performance evaluation and results
- System deployment document
- Test results and reports of operational system
- User Manual
- Business Model
- Project Objectives
- Remote and real-time monitoring of patients in different medical scenarios enhancing their quality of healthcare.
- Provision of timely response in critical medical urgencies.
- Predicts healthcare plans and disease trends.
- Improve systems’ efficiency and robustness.
Introduction and Background
During the last five years, various healthcare solutions have been proposed involving use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Patient monitoring systems based on Biomedical Wireless Sensor Networks (BWSNs) and body area networks (BANs) have improved patients' health status in chronic care conditions, thus enabling physicians to intervene more timely in emergency. Patient monitoring in chronic cases demands pervasive healthcare for efficient response to treatment.
A BWSN monitors important medical data such as body temperature (Temp), blood pressure (B.P), electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalograph (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), electromyogram (EMG), heart rate, breathing rate and transmits it to a medical centre, where this data is used for health status monitoring, medical analysis and emergency treatments. A BWSN needs to guarantee that the packets having time critical data should be sensed and delivered to a medical centre reliably and efficiently within the delay bounds. A routing protocol is an essential part of BWSN to route the time critical data with minimum end-to-end delays using congestion free intermediate nodes. BWSNs require further research on QoS issues realizing requirements of time critical data flows in medical scenarios.
Time critical data flows in medical scenarios handle data according to time constraints associated with the flow and the urgency of data. A BWSN 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.
In this research proposal, A Pervasive Healthcare Testbed for Optimized Monitoring of Medical Data Services have been presented optimizing priority assignment mechanism to increase the throughput of time critical data packets. It will decide at runtime which data flow is to be given high priority based on its urgency. The data generated by the source sensor nodes will be compared with their respective threshold values. If the value of any type of sensed data is greater or close to its threshold value, priority will be assigned to that data stream. A classifier at the intermediate nodes will classify different data flows and assign queues according to their priority and the source node identity. The scheduler will adaptively schedule packets on the basis of the priority assigned by the proposed mechanism.
Previous schemes assign priority to the data flows on the basis of the source. When there are different data flows and priority is to be assigned to the packets on the basis of their urgency, in that case a mechanism is needed which monitors QoS among different data flows and within those data flows. The propose scheme will assign priority to the data packets on the basis of their data contents and not on the basis of source nodes as proposed in other schemes.