Fibers and fabrics for chemical and biological sensing

Wearable sensors can be used to monitor many interesting parameters about the wearer’s physiology and environment, with important applications in personal health and well-being, sports performance and personal safety. Wearable chemical sensors can monitor the status of the wearer by accessing body fluids, such as sweat, in an unobtrusive manner. They can also be used to protect the wearer from hazards in the environment by sampling potentially harmful gas emissions such as carbon monoxide. Integrating chemical sensors into textile structures is a challenging and complex task. Issues which must be considered include sample collection, calibration, waste handling, fouling and reliability. Sensors must also be durable and comfortable to wear. Here we present examples of wearable chemical sensors that monitor the person and also their environment. We also discuss the issues involved in developing wearable chemical sensors and strategies for sensor design and textile integration

Ethical issues of electronic patient data and informatics in clinical trial settings

The field of cancer bio-informatics unites the disciplines of scientific and clinical research withclinical practice and the treatment of individual patients. There is a need to study patients andsometimes their families, over many decades, to follow disease progress and long-term outcomes.This may require research teams to access the routinely-collected health data from generalpractice and hospital health records, prior to and after the cancer diagnosis is made. This clinicalinformation will increasingly include data provided by patients or acquired from them throughwearable devices that can monitor or deliver treatment, and data acquired from genetic relativesof the patient.All of these data, whether explicitly collected for the purpose of a clinical study, or routinelycollected as part of a patient?s life-time healthcare journey, are personal health data. There areethical and legal requirements to manage these data with care. This chapter explores the ethicalrequirements for collecting, holding, analysing and sharing personal health data, and thelegislation covering such activities

Exposure measurement error in PM2.5 health effects studies: A pooled analysis of eight personal exposure validation studies

Background: Exposure measurement error is a concern in long-term PM2.5 health studies using ambient concentrations as exposures. We assessed error magnitude by estimating calibration coefficients as the association between personal PM2.5 exposures from validation studies and typically available surrogate exposures. Methods: Daily personal and ambient PM2.5, and when available sulfate, measurements were compiled from nine cities, over 2 to 12 days. True exposure was defined as personal exposure to PM2.5 of ambient origin. Since PM2.5 of ambient origin could only be determined for five cities, personal exposure to total PM2.5 was also considered. Surrogate exposures were estimated as ambient PM2.5 at the nearest monitor or predicted outside subjects’ homes. We estimated calibration coefficients by regressing true on surrogate exposures in random effects models. Results: When monthly-averaged personal PM2.5 of ambient origin was used as the true exposure, calibration coefficients equaled 0.31 (95% CI:0.14, 0.47) for nearest monitor and 0.54 (95% CI:0.42, 0.65) for outdoor home predictions. Between-city heterogeneity was not found for outdoor home PM2.5 for either true exposure. Heterogeneity was significant for nearest monitor PM2.5, for both true exposures, but not after adjusting for city-average motor vehicle number for total personal PM2.5. Conclusions: Calibration coefficients were <1, consistent with previously reported chronic health risks using nearest monitor exposures being under-estimated when ambient concentrations are the exposure of interest. Calibration coefficients were closer to 1 for outdoor home predictions, likely reflecting less spatial error. Further research is needed to determine how our findings can be incorporated in future health studies

A realisation of ethical concerns with smartphone personal health monitoring apps

The pervasiveness of smartphones has facilitated a new way in which owners of devices can monitor their health using applications (apps) that are installed on their smartphones. Smartphone personal health monitoring (SPHM) collects and stores health related data of the user either locally or in a third party storing mechanism. They are also capable of giving feedback to the user of the app in response to conditions are provided to the app therefore empowering the user to actively make decisions to adjust their lifestyle. Regardless of the benefits that this new innovative technology offers to its users, there are some ethical concerns to the user of SPHM apps. These ethical concerns are in some way connected to the features of SPHM apps. From a literature survey, this paper attempts to recognize ethical issues with personal health monitoring apps on smartphones, viewed in light of general ethics of ubiquitous computing. The paper argues that there are ethical concerns with the use of SPHM apps regardless of the benefits that the technology offers to users due to SPHM apps’ ubiquity leaving them open to known and emerging ethical concerns. The paper then propose a need further empirical research to validate the claim

Integrating sensor streams in pHealth networks

Personal Health (pHealth) sensor networks are generally used to monitor the wellbeing of both athletes and the general public to inform health specialists of future and often serious ailments. The problem facing these domain experts is the scale and quality of data they must search in order to extract meaningful results. By using peer-to-peer sensor architectures and a mechanism for reducing the search space, we can, to some extent, address the scalability issue. However, synchronisation and normalisation of distributed sensor streams remains a problem in many networks. In the case of pHealth sensor networks, it is crucial for experts to align multiple sensor readings before query or data mining activities can take place. This paper presents a system for clustering and synchronising sensor streams in preparation for user queries

The Establishment of Child Health Cadre as Prevention for Foodborne Disease at Primary Schools

Personal health, including health on school-age children comes from food intake. But often, these foods can cause health problems, such as foodborne diseases. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to monitor the Clean and Healthy Lifestyle (CHL) of children at school through the establishment and evaluation of child health cadres. Phases of activities are the selection of child health cadres (10 children), training and determination of the child that will be monitored (40 children), preliminary assessment on the monitored CHL, two-month monitoring and final assessment. Monitored CHL are the CHL associated with foodborne diseases such as clean nails, snacks habit, habit of bringing lunch, and hand-washing habit in schools. Descriptive analysis showed that there were differences between the CHL school children before and after the monitoring conducted by child health cadres, however the results of the Chi-Square Test indicated that only the habit of bringing lunch that yield a significant change (p=0.01). Evaluation of the routine activity showed that the average cadre activity on monitoring is 75.7% and the average of completeness monitoring books is 91.9%. The activities of child health cadres can be applied on an ongoing basis with the school health program activities that have been established in schools

Elderly Healthcare Assistance Application using Mobile Phone

As people become older, people generally will experience a health decline such as becomes weak, susceptible to disease, decreased vision ability, etc. Therefore, special health attention is needed for the elderly people, especially from the family member or personal doctors / nurses. On the other hand, the number of elderly people in the world is rapidly increase so there’s more people will need special attention. Therefore, this research try to develop an application on mobile phone that could help elderly people and their family member to supervise and monitor the health of the elderly. This application has feature to monitor the location of the elderly, remainder to take the medication, doctor appointment remainder, medical record records, emergency phone to family number or personal doctor, etc. From the experimental results of the application to the participant and the test with the questionnaire on the prospective users, 94% of respondents feel the application is very useful and can run well as needed

Elderly Healthcare Assistance Application using Mobile Phone

As people become older, people generally will experience a health decline such as becomes weak, susceptible to disease, decreased vision ability, etc. Therefore, special health attention is needed for the elderly people, especially from the family member or personal doctors / nurses. On the other hand, the number of elderly people in the world is rapidly increase so there’s more people will need special attention. Therefore, this research try to develop an application on mobile phone that could help elderly people and their family member to supervise and monitor the health of the elderly. This application has feature to monitor the location of the elderly, remainder to take the medication, doctor appointment remainder, medical record records, emergency phone to family number or personal doctor, etc. From the experimental results of the application to the participant and the test with the questionnaire on the prospective users, 94% of respondents feel the application is very useful and can run well as needed. Keywords—Elderly; Healthcare

FEASIBILITY AND ACCEPTABILITY OF MY ELECTRONIC PERSONAL HEALTH RECORD MONITOR (MY-EPHRM)

Objectives: Smartphones could be used as a novel approach to improve medication adherence and patient's behaviour; due to constant accessibility, and the provision of a repository for health and medication information. This study aimed to assess the feasibility and acceptability of the use of My Electronic Personal Health Record Monitor (My-ePHRM), a newly-developed application (software) for personal health record monitoring as well as the factors that predict its acceptability.Methods: A cross-sectional study using structured questionnaire was conducted on 363 potential users. Statistical analyses were performed usingSPSS version 20.0. Description statistics and multiple logistic regression analysis were employed.Results: Majority of the participants were females (69.7%) with the mean age of 22 y (SD±1.7). Of the total number of the participants, 63.9% agreed that My-ePHRM was easy to operate and 50.7% thought that the language used was simple and easy to understand. Most of the participants found the features of My-ePHRM attractive (61.7%) and 52.1% would like to own it in the future. The majority agreed that My-ePHRM could increase health knowledge (57.0%), increase drug knowledge (54.0%) and could improve drug adherence (56.5%). Overall, (52.6%) believed that it was a good programme and (54.3%) would recommend it to others. Multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that ethnicity, gender and programme of the study participants did not predict My-ePHRM acceptance.Conclusion: My-ePHRM has been shown to be acceptable, simple and practical by its target users creating a huge potential in patients participation in documenting health-related activities.Â