On the Deployment of Healthcare Applications over Fog Computing Infrastructure

Fog computing is considered as the most promising enhancement of the traditional cloud computing paradigm in order to handle potential issues introduced by the emerging Interned of Things (IoT) framework at the network edge. The heterogeneous nature, the extensive distribution and the hefty number of deployed IoT nodes will disrupt existing functional models, creating confusion. However, IoT will facilitate the rise of new applications, with automated healthcare monitoring platforms being amongst them. This paper presents the pillars of design for such applications, along with the evaluation of a working prototype that collects ECG traces from a tailor-made device and utilizes the patient's smartphone as a Fog gateway for securely sharing them to other authorized entities. This prototype will allow patients to share information to their physicians, monitor their health status independently and notify the authorities rapidly in emergency situations. Historical data will also be available for further analysis, towards identifying patterns that may improve medical diagnoses in the foreseeable future

Design and evaluation of a person-centric heart monitoring system over fog computing infrastructure

Heart disease and stroke are becoming the leading cause of death worldwide. Electrocardiography monitoring devices (ECG) are the only tool that helps physicians diagnose cardiac abnormalities. Although the design of ECGs has followed closely the electronics miniaturization evolution over the years, existing wearable ECG have limited accuracy and rely on external resources to analyze the signal and evaluate heart activity. In this paper, we work towards empowering the wearable device with processing capabilities to locally analyze the signal and identify abnormal behavior. The ability to differentiate between normal and abnormal heart activity significantly reduces (a) the need to store the signals, (b) the data transmitted to the cloud and (c) the overall power consumption. Based on this concept, the HEART platform is presented that combines wearable embedded devices, mobile edge devices, and cloud services to provide on-the-spot, reliable, accurate and instant monitoring of the heart. The performance of the system is evaluated concerning the accuracy of detecting abnormal events and the power consumption of the wearable device. Results indicate that a very high percentage of success can be achieved in terms of event detection ratio and the device being operative up to a several days without the need for a recharge

Using smartphone bases biodevices for analyzing physiological, psychological and behavioral user’s habits

As a consequence of increasing life expectancy, the promotion of lifestyles that allow aging wellbeing guarantees has acquired great importance in the developed countries. However, the adherence to healthy behaviors in young and adult people remains as a big problem in the community health field. The development of markers of adherence to healthy lifestyles and the evaluation its effectiveness is a goal of many research groups. This paper presents a system for analyzing physiological, psychological and behavioural user’s habits using a smartphone and externals biodevices. We use an Android smartphone with an internal tri-axial accelerometer and GPS to monitor physical activity. The smartphone is connected via Bluetooth to a respiratory sensor for breath monitoring. In addition, Android application contains psychological questionnaires to analyze user’s mood state and at the same, social interaction is analyzed tracking phone usage and user’s social network. Finally, the collected information is sent to a remote server for a long-term processing.Postprint (published version

Android Fog Gateway for Personalized Health Monitoring

Bakalaureusetöö kirjeldab hajusarvutusel põhineva ja üle õhu programmeeritava terviseseire süsteemi loomist ja kasutamist. Süsteem mõeldud arstidele ja hooldajatele enda patsientide pulsi jälgimiseks. Süsteem koosneb veebiserverist, Androidi aplikatsioonist ja Polar H7 pulsivööst. Patsiendi pulsi hetkeseisu kuvatakse Androidi aplikatsioonis, kuid kogu pulsiväärtuste ajalugu on nähtav vaid arstidele mõeldud veebilehel. Lisaks oskab Androidi aplikatsioon patsiendi pulssi analüüsida iga patsiendi jaoks spetsiaalselt loodud algoritmiga ning vajadusel teavitab patsiendi terviserikkest nii veebiserverit, kui ka saadab arsti telefonile sõnumi. Patsiendi seisundi muutumisel on olemas ka võimalus luua patsiendi jaoks uus algoritm ning see üle interneti Androidi seadmesse edastada.This bachelor’s thesis details the design, implementation, and deployment of a fog computing based Over-The-Air programmable medical system which is intended to be used by doctors and caretakers to monitor the heart rate of their patients. The system consists of a web service, an Android application, and a Polar H7 heart rate sensor. It displays the current heart rate in the Android application and also has the ability to display the patient’s whole heart rate history using a Web service. With the customized algorithm built for each patient, the Android application analyzes the patient’s heart rate and notifies the doctor as well as the Web service when it detects an abnormal heart rate value. In case the patient’s condition changes, a new algorithm can be sent from the Web service to the application

On the Capability of Smartphones to Perform as Communication Gateways in Medical Wireless Personal Area Networks

This paper evaluates and characterizes the technical performance of medical wireless personal area networks (WPANs) that are based on smartphones. For this purpose, a prototype of a health telemonitoring system is presented. The prototype incorporates a commercial Android smartphone, which acts as a relay point, or “gateway”, between a set of wireless medical sensors and a data server. Additionally, the paper investigates if the conventional capabilities of current commercial smartphones can be affected by their use as gateways or “Holters” in health monitoring applications. Specifically, the profiling has focused on the CPU and power consumption of the mobile devices. These metrics have been measured under several test conditions modifying the smartphone model, the type of sensors connected to the WPAN, the employed Bluetooth profile (SPP (serial port profile) or HDP (health device profile)), the use of other peripherals, such as a GPS receiver, the impact of the use of theWi-Fi interface or the employed method to encode and forward the data that are collected from the sensors.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TEC2009-13763-C02-0

Implementation of Local Transport Protocol Library (LTPlib) into Real-time Operating System (RTOS)

Healthcare is getting more expensive overtime. Personal telehealth systems, including remote patient monitoring and management, can facilitate caregiver to effectively deliver high-quality healthcare service at lower cost. The recent developments in information and communication technologies have increased the degree of connectivity between people using smart devices. To further enhance these developments, implementation of the Local Transport Protocol library is ported to a micro real-time operating system to achieve a low cost yet highly efficient embedded system.The selected hardware and software provide easy interface for data transfer from a monitoring and measuring device to remote locations. Targeting the Continua Health Alliance compliancy as the future task of this research and development work can be a significant contribution to the future of healthcare monitoring system

Design and Implementation of Continua Compliant Wireless Medical Gateway

Collecting data from various medical devices associated with a patient at one location and sending it to a caregiver at another location in an integrated format is a challenge in telehealth systems. This challenge comes from following factors. First, these medical devices are not equipped with long range communication technologies. Second, medical devices from different manufacturers lack interoperability. Third, communication time is inconsistent. In order to address above challenges, a Continua compliant Wireless Medical Gateway (WMG) is designed and implemented in this research using various hardware components such as BeagleBone Black, Stollmann adapter and Unison Real-Time OS (RTOS). Being complaint to Continua enables interoperability between medical devices from different manufacturers. The selected hardware and software provide easy interface for data transfer over long range. The prototype has been tested extensively using various scenarios to calculate the total communication time, delay consistency and data accuracy. The results show the consistent deviation in communication time for WMG

Design for energy-efficient and reliable fog-assisted healthcare IoT systems

Cardiovascular disease and diabetes are two of the most dangerous diseases as they are the leading causes of death in all ages. Unfortunately, they cannot be completely cured with the current knowledge and existing technologies. However, they can be effectively managed by applying methods of continuous health monitoring. Nonetheless, it is difficult to achieve a high quality of healthcare with the current health monitoring systems which often have several limitations such as non-mobility support, energy inefficiency, and an insufficiency of advanced services. Therefore, this thesis presents a Fog computing approach focusing on four main tracks, and proposes it as a solution to the existing limitations. In the first track, the main goal is to introduce Fog computing and Fog services into remote health monitoring systems in order to enhance the quality of healthcare. In the second track, a Fog approach providing mobility support in a real-time health monitoring IoT system is proposed. The handover mechanism run by Fog-assisted smart gateways helps to maintain the connection between sensor nodes and the gateways with a minimized latency. Results show that the handover latency of the proposed Fog approach is 10%-50% less than other state-of-the-art mobility support approaches. In the third track, the designs of four energy-efficient health monitoring IoT systems are discussed and developed. Each energy-efficient system and its sensor nodes are designed to serve a specific purpose such as glucose monitoring, ECG monitoring, or fall detection; with the exception of the fourth system which is an advanced and combined system for simultaneously monitoring many diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Results show that these sensor nodes can continuously work, depending on the application, up to 70-155 hours when using a 1000 mAh lithium battery. The fourth track mentioned above, provides a Fog-assisted remote health monitoring IoT system for diabetic patients with cardiovascular disease. Via several proposed algorithms such as QT interval extraction, activity status categorization, and fall detection algorithms, the system can process data and detect abnormalities in real-time. Results show that the proposed system using Fog services is a promising approach for improving the treatment of diabetic patients with cardiovascular disease