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

Bringing pervasive embedded networks to the service cloud: a lightweight middleware approach

The emergence of novel pervasive networks that consist of tiny embedded nodes have reduced the gap between real and virtual worlds. This paradigm has opened the Service Cloud to a variety of wireless devices especially those with sensorial and actuating capabilities. Those pervasive networks contribute to build new context-aware applications that interpret the state of the physical world at real-time. However, traditional Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), which are widely used in the current Internet are unsuitable for such resource-constraint devices since they are too heavy. In this research paper, an internetworking approach is proposed in order to address that important issue. The main part of our proposal is the Knowledge-Aware and Service-Oriented (KASO) Middleware that has been designed for pervasive embedded networks. KASO Middleware implements a diversity of mechanisms, services and protocols which enable developers and business processing designers to deploy, expose, discover, compose, and orchestrate real-world services (i.e. services running on sensor/actuator devices). Moreover, KASO Middleware implements endpoints to offer those services to the Cloud in a REST manner. Our internetworking approach has been validated through a real healthcare telemonitoring system deployed in a sanatorium. The validation tests show that KASO Middleware successfully brings pervasive embedded networks to the Service Cloud

Energy and Accuracy Trade-Offs in Accelerometry-Based Activity Recognition

Driven by real-world applications such as fitness, wellbeing and healthcare, accelerometry-based activity recognition has been widely studied to provide context-awareness to future pervasive technologies. Accurate recognition and energy efficiency are key issues in enabling long-term and unobtrusive monitoring. While the majority of accelerometry-based activity recognition systems stream data to a central point for processing, some solutions process data locally on the sensor node to save energy. In this paper, we investigate the trade-offs between classification accuracy and energy efficiency by comparing on- and off-node schemes. An empirical energy model is presented and used to evaluate the energy efficiency of both systems, and a practical case study (monitoring the physical activities of office workers) is developed to evaluate the effect on classification accuracy. The results show a 40% energy saving can be obtained with a 13% reduction in classification accuracy, but this performance depends heavily on the wearer’s activity

Technology inspired design for pervasive healthcare

Pervasive healthcare technologies are increasingly using novel sensory devices that are able to measure phenomena that could not be measured before. To develop novel healthcare applications that use these largely untested technologies, it is important to have a design process that allows proper exploration of the capabilities of the novel technologies. We focus on the technology-inspired design process that was used in the development of a system to support posture and provide guidance by nudging people, and how this has lead us to explore pervasive healthcare applications

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

The Internet of Hackable Things

The Internet of Things makes possible to connect each everyday object to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. From a security and privacy perspective, this tsunami of connectivity represents a disaster, which makes each object remotely hackable. We claim that, in order to tackle this issue, we need to address a new challenge in security: education

Enabling pervasive computing with smart phones

The authors discuss their experience with a number of mobile telephony projects carried out in the context of the European Union Information Society Technologies research program, which aims to develop mobile information services. They identify areas where use of smart phones can enable pervasive computing and offer practical advice in terms of lessons learned. To this end, they first look at the mobile telephone as * the end point of a mobile information service,* the control device for ubiquitous systems management and configuration,* the networking hub for personal and body area networks, and* identification tokens.They conclude with a discussion of business and practical issues that play a significant role in deploying research systems in realistic situations

Applications of wireless sensor networks in pharmaceutical industry

Advances in wireless sensor networking have opened up new opportunities in healthcare systems. The future will see the integration of the abundance of existing specialized medical technology with pervasive, wireless networks. Radio frequency identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are the two key elements of Pervasive computing and are considered as interrelated technologies. Although RFID has been used in various areas but it lacks intelligence that is its ability to process information and respond to real world events. People are using large scale WSN to monitor real-time environment status. RFID technology, if combined with other sensors, may enable a range of other applications that can exponentially increase visibility and monitoring. Combined with RFID a general sensor can be upgraded to intelligent wireless sensor (Smart node), having sensing, computation, communication into a single small device Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) With dazzling wireless technology now available, it's tempting for manufacturers to snatch up any wireless sensor that comes along as a means of optimizing processes and plant performance. This is especially true within the pharmaceutical industry, where vendors are plying industrial-strength wireless sensors for temperature, humidity and pressure, as well as sensitive process-monitoring wireless devices to support PAT applications. In this paper we surveyed the existing wireless sensor and RFID based technologies that target the healthcare application