Internet of Things in Emergency Medical Care and Services

Emergency care is a critical area of medicine whose outcomes are influenced by the time, availability, and accuracy of contextual information. In addition, the success of emergency care depends on the quality and accuracy of the information received during the emergency call and data collected during the emergency transportation. The success of a follow medical treatment at an emergency care unit depends too on data collected during the two phases: emergency call and transport. However, most information received during an emergency-call is inaccurate and the process of information collection, storage, processing, and retrieval, during an emergency-transportation, is remaining manual and time-consuming. Emergency doctors mostly lack patient’s health records and base the medical treatment on a set of collected information including information provided by the patient or his relatives. Hence, the emergency care delivery is more patient-centered than patient-centric information. Wireless body area network and Internet of Technology (IoT) enable accurate collection of data and are increasingly used in medical applications. This chapter discusses the challenges facing the emergency medical care services delivery, especially in the developing countries. It presents and discusses an IoT platform for a patient-centric-information-based emergency care services delivery. The study is focused on a case of road traffic injury. Results of conducted experiments are discussed

A Priority-based Fair Queuing (PFQ) Model for Wireless Healthcare System

Healthcare is a very active research area, primarily due to the increase in the elderly population that leads to increasing number of emergency situations that require urgent actions. In recent years some of wireless networked medical devices were equipped with different sensors to measure and report on vital signs of patient remotely. The most important sensors are Heart Beat Rate (ECG), Pressure and Glucose sensors. However, the strict requirements and real-time nature of medical applications dictate the extreme importance and need for appropriate Quality of Service (QoS), fast and accurate delivery of a patient’s measurements in reliable e-Health ecosystem. As the elderly age and older adult population is increasing (65 years and above) due to the advancement in medicine and medical care in the last two decades; high QoS and reliable e-health ecosystem has become a major challenge in Healthcare especially for patients who require continuous monitoring and attention. Nevertheless, predictions have indicated that elderly population will be approximately 2 billion in developing countries by 2050 where availability of medical staff shall be unable to cope with this growth and emergency cases that need immediate intervention. On the other side, limitations in communication networks capacity, congestions and the humongous increase of devices, applications and IOT using the available communication networks add extra layer of challenges on E-health ecosystem such as time constraints, quality of measurements and signals reaching healthcare centres. Hence this research has tackled the delay and jitter parameters in E-health M2M wireless communication and succeeded in reducing them in comparison to current available models. The novelty of this research has succeeded in developing a new Priority Queuing model ‘’Priority Based-Fair Queuing’’ (PFQ) where a new priority level and concept of ‘’Patient’s Health Record’’ (PHR) has been developed and integrated with the Priority Parameters (PP) values of each sensor to add a second level of priority. The results and data analysis performed on the PFQ model under different scenarios simulating real M2M E-health environment have revealed that the PFQ has outperformed the results obtained from simulating the widely used current models such as First in First Out (FIFO) and Weight Fair Queuing (WFQ). PFQ model has improved transmission of ECG sensor data by decreasing delay and jitter in emergency cases by 83.32% and 75.88% respectively in comparison to FIFO and 46.65% and 60.13% with respect to WFQ model. Similarly, in pressure sensor the improvements were 82.41% and 71.5% and 68.43% and 73.36% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. Data transmission were also improved in the Glucose sensor by 80.85% and 64.7% and 92.1% and 83.17% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. However, non-emergency cases data transmission using PFQ model was negatively impacted and scored higher rates than FIFO and WFQ since PFQ tends to give higher priority to emergency cases. Thus, a derivative from the PFQ model has been developed to create a new version namely “Priority Based-Fair Queuing-Tolerated Delay” (PFQ-TD) to balance the data transmission between emergency and non-emergency cases where tolerated delay in emergency cases has been considered. PFQ-TD has succeeded in balancing fairly this issue and reducing the total average delay and jitter of emergency and non-emergency cases in all sensors and keep them within the acceptable allowable standards. PFQ-TD has improved the overall average delay and jitter in emergency and non-emergency cases among all sensors by 41% and 84% respectively in comparison to PFQ model

AMUSE: autonomic management of ubiquitous e-Health systems

Future e-Health systems will consist of low-power on-body wireless sensors attached to mobile users that interact with an ubiquitous computing environment to monitor the health and well being of patients in hospitals or at home. Patients or health practitioners have very little technical computing expertise so these systems need to be self-configuring and self-managing with little or no user input. More importantly, they should adapt autonomously to changes resulting from user activity, device failure, and the addition or loss of services. We propose the Self-Managed Cell (SMC) as an architectural pattern for all such types of ubiquitous computing applications and use an e-Health application in which on-body sensors are used to monitor a patient living in their home as an exemplar. We describe the services comprising the SMC and discuss cross-SMC interactions as well as the composition of SMCs into larger structures

Health management trends: The Internet of Things as a modernization and care tool

The modernization of health institutions is one of the biggest trends of our time. Part of the 4th industrial revolution, the Internet of Things, that allows a more personalized care and greater appreciation for the patient, can be a reality that is in the process of being consolidated worldwide. In Brazil, through the promulgation of decree number 9.854 of June 26th of 2019, the democratization and popularization of these technologies have started. This integrative review intends to verify the introduction of IoTs in the Brazilian scenario by investigating the potential as well as the weaknesses of this new technology. The research suggests that IoTs are a unique content that may improve productivity and process efficiencies but are still permeated by caveats that indicate system deficiencies and the need of further studies

Internet of Things (IoT) for Automated and Smart Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) is a recent technology paradigm that creates a global network of machines and devices that are capable of communicating with each other. Security cameras, sensors, vehicles, buildings, and software are examples of devices that can exchange data between each other. IoT is recognized as one of the most important areas of future technologies and is gaining vast recognition in a wide range of applications and fields related to smart homes and cities, military, education, hospitals, homeland security systems, transportation and autonomous connected cars, agriculture, intelligent shopping systems, and other modern technologies. This book explores the most important IoT automated and smart applications to help the reader understand the principle of using IoT in such applications

Internet of Things: Architecture and Services for Healthcare

Internet of Things (IoT) is a recent prominent collaboration of various technologies that enables spatially distributed devices (“things”) to sense, communicate and share information, thus generating a variety of applications and services in Healthcare. IoT is implemented in multiple domains like Smart city, energy and smart grid, Smart home, weather forecasting, Agriculture, Market and Transportation, Manufacturing and testing industries, Healthcare and many more. IoT serves the purpose of making tasks more efficient and productive and at the same time ensuring quality and reliability. IoT technologies provide an enabling framework for inter-connecting devices, systems, and services that go beyond Machine-to-Machine scenarios within today’s internet infrastructure. Healthcare industry is among the fastest fields to embrace IoT for numerous health services. IoT technologies will enable doctors / physicians / caretakers to be in touch with patients all the time. Various physiological parameters and markers can be monitored on a real-time basis for early detection of serious health symptoms that could endanger the life of patients. Diagnosis of diseases can be more accurate and in time for early treatment which will significantly improve recovery time. Diagnostic medical devices, sensors, and imaging devices that are integrated within the network for building an efficient and real-time system. The market for IoT in the healthcare sector is expected to grow rapidly in terms of connecting hospitals with patients for remote monitoring, emergency care services and remote surgery through augmented virtual reality. This thesis explores advances in IoT- based technologies in the healthcare environment. The thesis presents an architecture that defines a possible reference platform for seamless inter-connectivity between devices and software systems to enable new services. The architecture has multiple layers each of which performs specific functions to enable the realization of novel healthcare services. The thesis provides a comprehensive comparison between different Short range communication technologies, Mobile communication and Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies. Based upon different scenarios of IoT healthcare services implementation, data computation capabilities provided by various cloud computing models and edge computing models are also discussed. The thesis provides a survey on various healthcare services that are implemented inside (and outside) hospital premises, e.g., remote health monitoring, Ambient Assisted Living among others. The impact of two prominent key technologies: Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN) has been discussed and showed the benefits of implementing control and management function-especially at the edge network- utilizing SDN/NFV. This provides a flexible approach for deployment of healthcare services in close proximity to computing resources and improves communication control. IoT acknowledges a reliable and secure data exchange in real-time and oriented to improve Quality of Life (QoL). Internet of Things (IoT) serves the purpose of the advance concatenation of devices, systems, and services that go beyond the Machine-to-Machine scenario within today’s internet infrastructure with extended benefits

IoT Applications Computing

The evolution of emerging and innovative technologies based on Industry 4.0 concepts are transforming society and industry into a fully digitized and networked globe. Sensing, communications, and computing embedded with ambient intelligence are at the heart of the Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and Industry 4.0 technologies with expanding applications in manufacturing, transportation, health, building automation, agriculture, and the environment. It is expected that the emerging technology clusters of ambient intelligence computing will not only transform modern industry but also advance societal health and wellness, as well as and make the environment more sustainable. This book uses an interdisciplinary approach to explain the complex issue of scientific and technological innovations largely based on intelligent computing

A Survey on Virtualization of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are gaining tremendous importance thanks to their broad range of commercial applications such as in smart home automation, health-care and industrial automation. In these applications multi-vendor and heterogeneous sensor nodes are deployed. Due to strict administrative control over the specific WSN domains, communication barriers, conflicting goals and the economic interests of different WSN sensor node vendors, it is difficult to introduce a large scale federated WSN. By allowing heterogeneous sensor nodes in WSNs to coexist on a shared physical sensor substrate, virtualization in sensor network may provide flexibility, cost effective solutions, promote diversity, ensure security and increase manageability. This paper surveys the novel approach of using the large scale federated WSN resources in a sensor virtualization environment. Our focus in this paper is to introduce a few design goals, the challenges and opportunities of research in the field of sensor network virtualization as well as to illustrate a current status of research in this field. This paper also presents a wide array of state-of-the art projects related to sensor network virtualization

Contributions to Context-Aware Smart Healthcare: A Security and Privacy Perspective

Les tecnologies de la informació i la comunicació han canviat les nostres vides de manera irreversible. La indústria sanitària, una de les indústries més grans i de major creixement, està dedicant molts esforços per adoptar les últimes tecnologies en la pràctica mèdica diària. Per tant, no és sorprenent que els paradigmes sanitaris estiguin en constant evolució cercant serveis més eficients, eficaços i sostenibles. En aquest context, el potencial de la computació ubiqua mitjançant telèfons intel·ligents, rellotges intel·ligents i altres dispositius IoT ha esdevingut fonamental per recopilar grans volums de dades, especialment relacionats amb l'estat de salut i la ubicació de les persones. Les millores en les capacitats de detecció juntament amb l'aparició de xarxes de telecomunicacions d'alta velocitat han facilitat la implementació d'entorns sensibles al context, com les cases i les ciutats intel·ligents, capaços d'adaptar-se a les necessitats dels ciutadans. La interacció entre la computació ubiqua i els entorns sensibles al context va obrir la porta al paradigma de la salut intel·ligent, centrat en la prestació de serveis de salut personalitzats i de valor afegit mitjançant l'explotació de grans quantitats de dades sanitàries, de mobilitat i contextuals. No obstant, la gestió de dades sanitàries, des de la seva recollida fins a la seva anàlisi, planteja una sèrie de problemes desafiants a causa del seu caràcter altament confidencial. Aquesta tesi té per objectiu abordar diversos reptes de seguretat i privadesa dins del paradigma de la salut intel·ligent. Els resultats d'aquesta tesi pretenen ajudar a la comunitat científica a millorar la seguretat dels entorns intel·ligents del futur, així com la privadesa dels ciutadans respecte a les seves dades personals i sanitàries.Las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación han cambiado nuestras vidas de forma irreversible. La industria sanitaria, una de las industrias más grandes y de mayor crecimiento, está dedicando muchos esfuerzos por adoptar las últimas tecnologías en la práctica médica diaria. Por tanto, no es sorprendente que los paradigmas sanitarios estén en constante evolución en busca de servicios más eficientes, eficaces y sostenibles. En este contexto, el potencial de la computación ubicua mediante teléfonos inteligentes, relojes inteligentes, dispositivos wearables y otros dispositivos IoT ha sido fundamental para recopilar grandes volúmenes de datos, especialmente relacionados con el estado de salud y la localización de las personas. Las mejoras en las capacidades de detección junto con la aparición de redes de telecomunicaciones de alta velocidad han facilitado la implementación de entornos sensibles al contexto, como las casas y las ciudades inteligentes, capaces de adaptarse a las necesidades de los ciudadanos. La interacción entre la computación ubicua y los entornos sensibles al contexto abrió la puerta al paradigma de la salud inteligente, centrado en la prestación de servicios de salud personalizados y de valor añadido mediante la explotación significativa de grandes cantidades de datos sanitarios, de movilidad y contextuales. No obstante, la gestión de datos sanitarios, desde su recogida hasta su análisis, plantea una serie de cuestiones desafiantes debido a su naturaleza altamente confidencial. Esta tesis tiene por objetivo abordar varios retos de seguridad y privacidad dentro del paradigma de la salud inteligente. Los resultados de esta tesis pretenden ayudar a la comunidad científica a mejorar la seguridad de los entornos inteligentes del futuro, así como la privacidad de los ciudadanos con respecto a sus datos personales y sanitarios.Information and communication technologies have irreversibly changed our lives. The healthcare industry, one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing industries, is dedicating many efforts in adopting the latest technologies into daily medical practice. It is not therefore surprising that healthcare paradigms are constantly evolving seeking for more efficient, effective and sustainable services. In this context, the potential of ubiquitous computing through smartphones, smartwatches, wearables and IoT devices has become fundamental to collect large volumes of data, including people's health status and people’s location. The enhanced sensing capabilities together with the emergence of high-speed telecommunication networks have facilitated the implementation of context-aware environments, such as smart homes and smart cities, able to adapt themselves to the citizens needs. The interplay between ubiquitous computing and context-aware environments opened the door to the so-called smart health paradigm, focused on the provision of added-value personalised health services by meaningfully exploiting vast amounts of health, mobility and contextual data. However, the management of health data, from their gathering to their analysis, arises a number of challenging issues due to their highly confidential nature. In particular, this dissertation addresses several security and privacy challenges within the smart health paradigm. The results of this dissertation are intended to help the research community to enhance the security of the intelligent environments of the future as well as the privacy of the citizens regarding their personal and health data