Medical Informatics

Information technology has been revolutionizing the everyday life of the common man, while medical science has been making rapid strides in understanding disease mechanisms, developing diagnostic techniques and effecting successful treatment regimen, even for those cases which would have been classified as a poor prognosis a decade earlier. The confluence of information technology and biomedicine has brought into its ambit additional dimensions of computerized databases for patient conditions, revolutionizing the way health care and patient information is recorded, processed, interpreted and utilized for improving the quality of life. This book consists of seven chapters dealing with the three primary issues of medical information acquisition from a patient's and health care professional's perspective, translational approaches from a researcher's point of view, and finally the application potential as required by the clinicians/physician. The book covers modern issues in Information Technology, Bioinformatics Methods and Clinical Applications. The chapters describe the basic process of acquisition of information in a health system, recent technological developments in biomedicine and the realistic evaluation of medical informatics

Sistemas de telemedicina y teleasistencia basado en estándares abiertos y software libre para entornos residenciales

Las soluciones de asistencia sanitaria a domicilio se están convirtiendo en una respuesta a la necesidad de controlar los costes sanitarios derivados tanto del progresivo envejecimiento de la población como del incremento del número de pacientes con enfermedades crónicas. Las mejoras realizadas en las tecnologías de la información y comunicaciones (TIC) han ayudado al gran avance experimentado en los ultimos años en el desarrollo de soluciones de telemedicina y teleasistencia. Integrar a los principales actores en el cuidado a domicilio de esas personas es clave para un ofrecer un servicio de calidad pero a menudo los sistemas de telemedicina y teleasistencia no tienen su ciente interoperabilidad con el resto de soluciones o fallan por no tener en cuenta ciertos aspectos sociales que reducen la aceptación y uso del sistema. Mejorar la integración del equipamiento TIC (p.e. teleasistencia domiciliaria) en los cuidados sanitarios y el bienestar es una demanda de los ciudadanos que se debe proporcionar a un coste razonable. El principal objetivo de este proyecto es tratar de conseguir una comunicación sencilla entre las personas dependientes, sus familiares y el personal sanitario y proporcionar una solución para conectar los dispositivos médicos con la pasarela residencial (RGW). El diseño del sistema propone una solución flexible y modular basada en la plataforma OSGi para ofrecer servicios de telemedicina y teleasistencia para pacientes en casa. Este proyecto presenta un sistema de videoconferencia basado en un estándar de redes multimedia muy extendido para comunicar a los actores del servicio sanitario y posee una negociación de la transmisión y administración sencilla. Además, el servicio de telemedicina se basa en los estándares de informática médica HL7 e ISO/IEEE 1073 para comunicar la información médica entre la pasarela residencial del paciente y el servidor de Historia Clínica Electrónica (EHR). Se ha implementado un driver para dispositivos médicos Bluetooth para OSGi que permite adquirir los datos de salud monitorizados por los dispositivos de telemedicina disponibles en el hogar. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________Home healthcare solutions are becoming an answer to the need of controlling the healthcare costs resulting from both the progressive ageing of population and the increase of the number of patients with chronic diseases. In fact, chronic disease management has become a priority issue in the insurance health systems of Europe. The need to optimize the health resources and Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) enhancements have made e-health services experiment a great advance in the last years. Integration of the healthcare main actors is required to o er a quality service but e-health systems often lack adequate interoperability with another solutions and also commonly fail to take certain social aspects into account which slow down the acceptance and usage of the system. To improve the ICT (e.g. telehomecare) integration in care, living and wellness is a citizens demand that it should be provide at a ordable cost. The main goal of this proyect tries to achieve a seamless communication among the dependent people, relatives and medical sta and provide a solution to connect the medical devices with the Residential GateWay (RGW). The system design propose a exible and modular solution based on the OSGi platform to support telemedicine and telecare services for patients at home. This proyect presents a videoconference system to communicate healthcare actors based on an widespread multimedia network standard that makes possible an automatic discovery of multimedia services and has a seamless streaming negotitation and management. Moreover, the telemedicine service is based on the health informatics standards HL7 and ISO/IEEE 1073 to communicate the medical information between patient residential gateway and a Electonic Healthcare Record (EHR) server. An medical Bluetooth driver for the OSGi framework is implemented to adquire the health monitorized data from the medical devices at home.Ingeniería de Telecomunicació

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

Enhanced Living Environments

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)”. The concept of Enhanced Living Environments (ELE) refers to the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) that is more related with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Effective ELE solutions require appropriate ICT algorithms, architectures, platforms, and systems, having in view the advance of science and technology in this area and the development of new and innovative solutions that can provide improvements in the quality of life for people in their homes and can reduce the financial burden on the budgets of the healthcare providers. The aim of this book is to become a state-of-the-art reference, discussing progress made, as well as prompting future directions on theories, practices, standards, and strategies related to the ELE area. The book contains 12 chapters and can serve as a valuable reference for undergraduate students, post-graduate students, educators, faculty members, researchers, engineers, medical doctors, healthcare organizations, insurance companies, and research strategists working in this area

Ecosystemic Evolution Feeded by Smart Systems

Information Society is advancing along a route of ecosystemic evolution. ICT and Internet advancements, together with the progression of the systemic approach for enhancement and application of Smart Systems, are grounding such an evolution. The needed approach is therefore expected to evolve by increasingly fitting into the basic requirements of a significant general enhancement of human and social well-being, within all spheres of life (public, private, professional). This implies enhancing and exploiting the net-living virtual space, to make it a virtuous beneficial integration of the real-life space. Meanwhile, contextual evolution of smart cities is aiming at strongly empowering that ecosystemic approach by enhancing and diffusing net-living benefits over our own lived territory, while also incisively targeting a new stable socio-economic local development, according to social, ecological, and economic sustainability requirements. This territorial focus matches with a new glocal vision, which enables a more effective diffusion of benefits in terms of well-being, thus moderating the current global vision primarily fed by a global-scale market development view. Basic technological advancements have thus to be pursued at the system-level. They include system architecting for virtualization of functions, data integration and sharing, flexible basic service composition, and end-service personalization viability, for the operation and interoperation of smart systems, supporting effective net-living advancements in all application fields. Increasing and basically mandatory importance must also be increasingly reserved for human–technical and social–technical factors, as well as to the associated need of empowering the cross-disciplinary approach for related research and innovation. The prospected eco-systemic impact also implies a social pro-active participation, as well as coping with possible negative effects of net-living in terms of social exclusion and isolation, which require incisive actions for a conformal socio-cultural development. In this concern, speed, continuity, and expected long-term duration of innovation processes, pushed by basic technological advancements, make ecosystemic requirements stricter. This evolution requires also a new approach, targeting development of the needed basic and vocational education for net-living, which is to be considered as an engine for the development of the related ‘new living know-how’, as well as of the conformal ‘new making know-how’