Impact of Mobile and Wireless Technology on Healthcare Delivery services

Modern healthcare delivery services embrace the use of leading edge technologies and new scientific discoveries to enable better cures for diseases and better means to enable early detection of most life-threatening diseases. The healthcare industry is finding itself in a state of turbulence and flux. The major innovations lie with the use of information technologies and particularly, the adoption of mobile and wireless applications in healthcare delivery [1]. Wireless devices are becoming increasingly popular across the healthcare field, enabling caregivers to review patient records and test results, enter diagnosis information during patient visits and consult drug formularies, all without the need for a wired network connection [2]. A pioneering medical-grade, wireless infrastructure supports complete mobility throughout the full continuum of healthcare delivery. It facilitates the accurate collection and the immediate dissemination of patient information to physicians and other healthcare care professionals at the time of clinical decision-making, thereby ensuring timely, safe, and effective patient care. This paper investigates the wireless technologies that can be used for medical applications, and the effectiveness of such wireless solutions in a healthcare environment. It discusses challenges encountered; and concludes by providing recommendations on policies and standards for the use of such technologies within hospitals

e-SAFE: Secure, Efficient and Forensics-Enabled Access to Implantable Medical Devices

To facilitate monitoring and management, modern Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) are often equipped with wireless capabilities, which raise the risk of malicious access to IMDs. Although schemes are proposed to secure the IMD access, some issues are still open. First, pre-sharing a long-term key between a patient's IMD and a doctor's programmer is vulnerable since once the doctor's programmer is compromised, all of her patients suffer; establishing a temporary key by leveraging proximity gets rid of pre-shared keys, but as the approach lacks real authentication, it can be exploited by nearby adversaries or through man-in-the-middle attacks. Second, while prolonging the lifetime of IMDs is one of the most important design goals, few schemes explore to lower the communication and computation overhead all at once. Finally, how to safely record the commands issued by doctors for the purpose of forensics, which can be the last measure to protect the patients' rights, is commonly omitted in the existing literature. Motivated by these important yet open problems, we propose an innovative scheme e-SAFE, which significantly improves security and safety, reduces the communication overhead and enables IMD-access forensics. We present a novel lightweight compressive sensing based encryption algorithm to encrypt and compress the IMD data simultaneously, reducing the data transmission overhead by over 50% while ensuring high data confidentiality and usability. Furthermore, we provide a suite of protocols regarding device pairing, dual-factor authentication, and accountability-enabled access. The security analysis and performance evaluation show the validity and efficiency of the proposed scheme

Wireless Medical Sensor Networks: Design Requirements and Enabling Technologies

This article analyzes wireless communication protocols that could be used in healthcare environments (e.g., hospitals and small clinics) to transfer real-time medical information obtained from noninvasive sensors. For this purpose the features of the three currently most widely used protocols—namely, Bluetooth® (IEEE 802.15.1), ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4), and Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11)—are evaluated and compared. The important features under consideration include data bandwidth, frequency band, maximum transmission distance, encryption and authentication methods, power consumption, and current applications. In addition, an overview of network requirements with respect to medical sensor features, patient safety and patient data privacy, quality of service, and interoperability between other sensors is briefly presented. Sensor power consumption is also discussed because it is considered one of the main obstacles for wider adoption of wireless networks in medical applications. The outcome of this assessment will be a useful tool in the hands of biomedical engineering researchers. It will provide parameters to select the most effective combination of protocols to implement a specific wireless network of noninvasive medical sensors to monitor patients remotely in the hospital or at home

A rapidly moving target: Conformance with e-health standards for mobile computing

The rapid adoption and evolution of mobile applications in health is posing significant challenges in terms of standards development, standards adoption, patient safety, and patient privacy. This is a complex continuum to navigate. There are many competing demands from the standards development process, to the use by clinicians and patients. In between there are compliance and conformance measures to be defined to ensure patient safety, effective use with integration into clinical workflow, and the protection of data and patient privacy involved in data collection and exchange. The result is a composite and intricate mixture of stakeholders, legislation, and policy together with national and individual perspectives. The challenges for standards development are numerous and include the cross over from traditional medical devices and mobile devices with apps, as well as harmonisation for consistent semantic terminology, and the diverse range of standards required in mobile health solutions. These issues affect the ability of conformance and compliance to be undertaken. Additionally, the need for interoperability in development of safe and secure mHealth software whilst being mindful of the implications for patient safety is vital. Conformance and compliance to established international standards is the first and, at present, the only step in meeting the mobile health challenges

A rapidly moving target: Conformance with e-health standards for mobile computing

The rapid adoption and evolution of mobile applications in health is posing significant challenges in terms of standards development, standards adoption, patient safety, and patient privacy. This is a complex continuum to navigate. There are many competing demands from the standards development process, to the use by clinicians and patients. In between there are compliance and conformance measures to be defined to ensure patient safety, effective use with integration into clinical workflow, and the protection of data and patient privacy involved in data collection and exchange. The result is a composite and intricate mixture of stakeholders, legislation, and policy together with national and individual perspectives. The challenges for standards development are numerous and include the cross over from traditional medical devices and mobile devices with apps, as well as harmonisation for consistent semantic terminology, and the diverse range of standards required in mobile health solutions. These issues affect the ability of conformance and compliance to be undertaken. Additionally, the need for interoperability in development of safe and secure mHealth software whilst being mindful of the implications for patient safety is vital. Conformance and compliance to established international standards is the first and, at present, the only step in meeting the mobile health challenges