Smart and Pervasive Healthcare

Smart and pervasive healthcare aims at facilitating better healthcare access, provision, and delivery by overcoming spatial and temporal barriers. It represents a shift toward understanding what patients and clinicians really need when placed within a specific context, where traditional face-to-face encounters may not be possible or sufficient. As such, technological innovation is a necessary facilitating conduit. This book is a collection of chapters written by prominent researchers and academics worldwide that provide insights into the design and adoption of new platforms in smart and pervasive healthcare. With the COVID-19 pandemic necessitating changes to the traditional model of healthcare access and its delivery around the world, this book is a timely contribution

Personalized data analytics for internet-of-things-based health monitoring

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has great potential to fundamentally alter the delivery of modern healthcare, enabling healthcare solutions outside the limits of conventional clinical settings. It can offer ubiquitous monitoring to at-risk population groups and allow diagnostic care, preventive care, and early intervention in everyday life. These services can have profound impacts on many aspects of health and well-being. However, this field is still at an infancy stage, and the use of IoT-based systems in real-world healthcare applications introduces new challenges. Healthcare applications necessitate satisfactory quality attributes such as reliability and accuracy due to their mission-critical nature, while at the same time, IoT-based systems mostly operate over constrained shared sensing, communication, and computing resources. There is a need to investigate this synergy between the IoT technologies and healthcare applications from a user-centered perspective. Such a study should examine the role and requirements of IoT-based systems in real-world health monitoring applications. Moreover, conventional computing architecture and data analytic approaches introduced for IoT systems are insufficient when used to target health and well-being purposes, as they are unable to overcome the limitations of IoT systems while fulfilling the needs of healthcare applications. This thesis aims to address these issues by proposing an intelligent use of data and computing resources in IoT-based systems, which can lead to a high-level performance and satisfy the stringent requirements. For this purpose, this thesis first delves into the state-of-the-art IoT-enabled healthcare systems proposed for in-home and in-hospital monitoring. The findings are analyzed and categorized into different domains from a user-centered perspective. The selection of home-based applications is focused on the monitoring of the elderly who require more remote care and support compared to other groups of people. In contrast, the hospital-based applications include the role of existing IoT in patient monitoring and hospital management systems. Then, the objectives and requirements of each domain are investigated and discussed. This thesis proposes personalized data analytic approaches to fulfill the requirements and meet the objectives of IoT-based healthcare systems. In this regard, a new computing architecture is introduced, using computing resources in different layers of IoT to provide a high level of availability and accuracy for healthcare services. This architecture allows the hierarchical partitioning of machine learning algorithms in these systems and enables an adaptive system behavior with respect to the user's condition. In addition, personalized data fusion and modeling techniques are presented, exploiting multivariate and longitudinal data in IoT systems to improve the quality attributes of healthcare applications. First, a real-time missing data resilient decision-making technique is proposed for health monitoring systems. The technique tailors various data resources in IoT systems to accurately estimate health decisions despite missing data in the monitoring. Second, a personalized model is presented, enabling variations and event detection in long-term monitoring systems. The model evaluates the sleep quality of users according to their own historical data. Finally, the performance of the computing architecture and the techniques are evaluated in this thesis using two case studies. The first case study consists of real-time arrhythmia detection in electrocardiography signals collected from patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases. The second case study is continuous maternal health monitoring during pregnancy and postpartum. It includes a real human subject trial carried out with twenty pregnant women for seven months

Advancing Australia as a digital economy: an update to the national digital economy strategy

The Government’s 2011 National Digital Economy Strategy (the 2011 NDES) set the goal of Australia becoming a leading digital economy by 2020. In doing so, it nominated eight goals to position Australia as a world leader in broadband connectivity and the use of digital technologies, and set out a bold vision for Australia to be a vibrant, trusted hub in the global digital economy. Advancing Australia as a Digital Economy is an update of the 2011 NDES, building on the 2011 NDES, and laying out the next steps towards delivering the government\u27s 2020 vision. Executive Summary In 2013, the use of online services by Australians covers almost every aspect of daily life, from checking tomorrow’s weather forecast to preparing a meal, paying bills, arranging a holiday or accessing education or health services from remote locations. Almost every aspect of life can be enhanced through some form of online service delivery. New ideas that apply digital technology to everyday situations emerge almost daily. Amid the relentless digital transformation of the global economy, more and more services are becoming available online. But there is much more to do before Australia is a leading digital economy. This strategic update provides an overview of the dozens of individual initiatives, and outlines a number of new initiatives, that represent the progress being made by the Australian Government to embrace our digital future. To advance Australia as a leading digital economy in the networked world, there are many small steps needed to achieve genuine transformation. The headline initiative is a Digital First commitment for government to offer its services digitally. As part of Digital First, priority government transactions will be end-to-end digital by 2017. Some alternative channels of service will remain so that agencies can provide assistance to those individuals who cannot easily access online services. As the economy moves to a greater reliance on online transactions there will be a corresponding need to improve performance and acceptance of online identity arrangements. The Government will contribute to developments in this critical area by significantly enhancing the existing government Document Verification Service and making this more widely available to the private sector. Businesses will be able to reliably identify customers by matching details from customers’ identity documents with records held by the documents’ issuing authorities. Recognising the role secure digital mailboxes can play in secure online communication, the Government will expand the use of digital mail by myGov and conduct proof-of-concept trials for other digital mailboxes. The trials are expected to demonstrate how digital mailboxes can better and more securely connect Australians with essential government services. The Government will seek to ensure that Australians have the skills required as the digital future unfolds by promoting a more cohesive approach to ICT skills development. In particular, it will develop a lifecycle approach to ICT skills, beginning with completing the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority’s development of the Australian Curriculum: Technologies and the development of stronger links between industry and tertiary education institutions. For Australia to become a leading digital economy, our ICT companies must also be working at the cutting edge of digital and technical innovation. Recognising the need to encourage the development of such companies, the Government will enhance the regulatory environment for innovative ICT start-up companies. For example, the Government will examine possible changes to improve employee share scheme arrangements for start-ups by the end of 2013. Looking even further ahead, the Government will also conduct a review of regulations governing crowd-sourced equity funding. In parallel to this document, the Government has released Australia’s first National Cloud Computing Strategy, which aims to address barriers to adoption while maximising the benefits of cloud computing for the whole Australian economy. It includes a series of actions such as changes to procurement policy to ensure that government agencies consider cloud services for ICT procurements. There will be help for digital economy beginners too. Individuals, businesses and not-for-profit organisations yet to engage meaningfully in the digital economy will be given a helping hand to do so. Digital Business Kits containing online skills tutorials that have been specifically tailored for different industries will be developed. Additionally, the Digital Enterprise and Digital Local Government programs will be extended to enhance household and business understanding of and engagement in the digital economy. High-speed broadband will be used to deliver services to older Australians with chronic disease. The Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record will be strongly promoted, as will Medicare- funded telehealth services. These services have opened up a new avenue for the delivery of health services that will particularly benefit people living in regional and remote Australia as well as those with limited mobility. The Government will also support the increased use of digital platforms to provide aged care services. Through annual National Telework Weeks the Government will continue to promote the uptake of telework, which is a key tool by which organisations will benefit from the digital economy. These initiatives are supported by a suite of actions outlined in the next section of this paper, which collectively form an integrated strategy to support our ambition to become a leading digital economy. This document has been fashioned as a strategic update to the 2011 National Digital Economy Strategy—the first of what is intended to be a regular series— to reflect the fast-moving, rapidly changing environment that is our digital future

Exploring Security, Privacy, and Reliability Strategies to Enable the Adoption of IoT

The Internet of things (IoT) is a technology that will enable machine-to-machine communication and eventually set the stage for self-driving cars, smart cities, and remote care for patients. However, some barriers that organizations face prevent them from the adoption of IoT. The purpose of this qualitative exploratory case study was to explore strategies that organization information technology (IT) leaders use for security, privacy, and reliability to enable the adoption of IoT devices. The study population included organization IT leaders who had knowledge or perceptions of security, privacy, and reliability strategies to adopt IoT at an organization in the eastern region of the United States. The diffusion of innovations theory, developed by Rogers, was used as the conceptual framework for the study. The data collection process included interviews with organization IT leaders (n = 8) and company documents and procedures (n = 15). Coding from the interviews and member checking were triangulated with company documents to produce major themes. Through methodological triangulation, 4 major themes emerged during my analysis: securing IoT devices is critical for IoT adoption, separating private and confidential data from analytical data, focusing on customer satisfaction goes beyond reliability, and using IoT to retrofit products. The findings from this study may benefit organization IT leaders by enhancing their security, privacy, and reliability practices and better protect their organization\u27s data. Improved data security practices may contribute to social change by reducing risk in security and privacy vulnerabilities while also contributing to new knowledge and insights that may lead to new discoveries such as a cure for a disease

Exploring the potential of using mobile applications in diabetes management

Background Diabetes mellitus is a common chronic disease and a leading cause of morbidity, complications and mortality worldwide. The number of people living with diabetes is projected to rise sharply over the forthcoming decades. Diabetes care is complex and can overburden clinicians and nurses. There is a need for innovative, flexible and cost-effective technologies to enable successful diabetes management. This thesis explores the opportunities and challenges of the mobile application (app) technology as a potential tool to support diabetes care and management. Purpose The purpose was to develop and evaluate a mobile app that supports healthcare professionals (HCPs) in clinical decision-making. Methods A mixed-methods approach was used following the user-centred design (UCD) framework for the design and implementation of all studies. Quantitative and qualitative systematic reviews of studies reporting the use of mobile apps to support diabetes management were undertaken to identify, appraise and summarise available research evidence. An interview study was carried out with diabetes specialist nurses (DSNs), to explore their experiences and views, and to identify user requirements for apps. Lastly, a guidelines-based mobile clinical decision-support app was developed and tested with junior doctors and DSNs in a controlled environment to evaluate its usability and impact on adherence to clinical guidelines, and to explore how participants experienced the app and their suggestions for improvements. Results Both reviews found that the existing evidence base for mobile apps is weak and inadequate to draw conclusions about the impact of their use as interventions in diabetes management. The interview study identified that nurses lack experience in using apps in clinical practice, even though they believed it could facilitate and support their work. ‘Diabetes & CKD’, a simple mobile decision-support app, has been designed and built for the study to assist HCPs in management of patients with diabetes and kidney disease and was tested by 39 junior doctors and 3 DSNs. It had no impact on the accuracy of decisions. Feedback from participants after the pilot session and usability testing indicated a wish to integrate such apps into their clinical practice with a strong willingness to use them in the future. Conclusions Application of UCD methods was efficient as the app was well-accepted by both DSNs and junior doctors. Despite the positive views and the strong willingness to use such apps, they are not widely used. There is a need to regulate the use of medical apps in clinical practice. Further research with rigorous methodology is required upon which policymakers and practitioners can base their decision-making

Cybersecurity and the Digital Health: An Investigation on the State of the Art and the Position of the Actors

Cybercrime is increasingly exposing the health domain to growing risk. The push towards a strong connection of citizens to health services, through digitalization, has undisputed advantages. Digital health allows remote care, the use of medical devices with a high mechatronic and IT content with strong automation, and a large interconnection of hospital networks with an increasingly effective exchange of data. However, all this requires a great cybersecurity commitment—a commitment that must start with scholars in research and then reach the stakeholders. New devices and technological solutions are increasingly breaking into healthcare, and are able to change the processes of interaction in the health domain. This requires cybersecurity to become a vital part of patient safety through changes in human behaviour, technology, and processes, as part of a complete solution. All professionals involved in cybersecurity in the health domain were invited to contribute with their experiences. This book contains contributions from various experts and different fields. Aspects of cybersecurity in healthcare relating to technological advance and emerging risks were addressed. The new boundaries of this field and the impact of COVID-19 on some sectors, such as mhealth, have also been addressed. We dedicate the book to all those with different roles involved in cybersecurity in the health domain

Wearables at work:preferences from an employee’s perspective

This exploratory study aims to obtain a first impression of the wishes and needs of employees on the use of wearables at work for health promotion. 76 employ-ees with a mean age of 40 years old (SD ±11.7) filled in a survey after trying out a wearable. Most employees see the potential of using wearable devices for workplace health promotion. However, according to employees, some negative aspects should be overcome before wearables can effectively contribute to health promotion. The most mentioned negative aspects were poor visualization and un-pleasantness of wearing. Specifically for the workplace, employees were con-cerned about the privacy of data collection