A Review On IoT-Based Healthcare Monitoring Systems For Patient In Remote Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a powerful technology that can enable users’ smart devices and sensors to link each other and access the internet for daily usage. It is a platform that can be used by end users to access many smart application fields, such as smart city, smart home, and smart healthcare. In recent years, the healthcare monitoring systems are becoming the major development field that use the IoT as advanced technology enabler. This review is discussing more about the design, functions, and the main uses of the IoT-based healthcare monitoring applications and systems for remote patient environments. Therefore, a deep review has been made to identify the usage, efficiency, and acceptability for the current applications and systems to become more efficient to patients. Different healthcare monitoring systems have employed the IoT to integrate the different wireless interfaces with the cloud-based healthcare services. These services are including the sensing, gathering, processing, storing, and learning more among the patients’ data. The various IoT healthcare applications will help to develop useful and effective solutions by using these systems in practice. From this review it can be proof that the IoT-based healthcare monitoring applications are growing faster to build more healthcare solutions that useful for different healthcare conditions and environment

Medical application of the Internet of Things (IoT): prototyping a telemonitoring system

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technological paradigm that can be perceived as an evolution of the internet. It is a shift from the traditional way of connecting devices to the internet, both in number and diversity of connected devices. This significant and marked growth in the number and diversity of devices connected to the internet has prompted a rethink of approaches to interconnect devices. The growth in the number of connected devices is driven by emerging applications and business models and supported by falling device costs while the growth in the diversity is driven by the reduction in the cost of manufacturing these devices. This has led to an increase in the number of users (not limited to people) of the internet. According to statistics by the ITU, by the end of 2015, about 3.2 billion people were using the Internet. Significantly, 34% of households in developing countries had Internet access, with more than 80% of households in developed countries. This indicates that it is realistic to leverage the IoT in living spaces. Appreciating this potential, many sectors of society are already positioning themselves to reap the benefits of this great promise. Hence the health sector would do well to adopt this technological paradigm to enhance service delivery. One specific area where the health sector can benefit from the adoption of the IoT is in telemonitoring and the associated early response to medical emergencies. Statistics and research show that there are areas in the medical field, that still need improvement to enhance service delivery. The Nursing Times has summed up these areas into four categories. The first one is a need to have a regular observation of patients and their vital signs. Here, health service providers (SPs) need to adopt creative and non-obtrusive methods that will encourage patients' participation in the monitoring of these vital signs. As much as possible, vital signs readings should be taken at convenient locations and times. Therefore, devices that have consistent internet access and are usually a part of daily life for most patients, such as the mobile phones would prove to be a key enabler of regular observation of vital signs. Furthermore, miniaturization of the vital signs monitoring or sensing devices would be a key step towards realizing this scenario. A lot of work is already being done to miniaturize these devices and make them as much a part of daily life as possible, as evidenced by advancements in the field of fitness and wearables. To map this use to the medical field, a system needs to be created that would allow for the aggregation of these disparate measuring and monitoring devices with medical information management systems. The second potential area of improvement is in the early recognition of deterioration of the patients. With regular observation of patients, it is possible to recognize deterioration at its early stage. Taking cognizance of the different needs of the various stakeholders is important to achieve the intended results. The third potential area of improvement is in the communication among stakeholders. This has to do with identifying the relevant data that must be delivered to the stakeholders during the monitoring and management process. Lastly, effective response to medical concerns is the other potential area of improvement. It is noted that patients do not generally get the right response at the right time because the information does not reach the rightly qualified personnel in good time. The regular and real-time capture of vital signs data coupled with added analytics can enable IoT SPs to design solutions that automate the management and transmission of medical data in a timely manner. This work addresses how the medical sector can adopt IoT-based solutions to improve service delivery, while utilizing existing resources such as smartphones, for the transmission and management of vital signs data, availing it to stakeholders and improve communication among them. It develops a telemonitoring system based on IoT design approaches. The developed system captures readings of vital signs from monitoring devices, processes and manages this data to serve the needs of the various stakeholders. Additionally, intelligence was added to enable the system to interpret the data and make decisions that will help medical practitioners and other stakeholders (patients, caregivers, etc.) to more timely, consistently and reliably provide and receive medical services/assistance. Two end user applications were developed. A cloud-based web application developed using PHP, HTML, and JavaScript and an Android mobile application developed using Java programming language in Android studio. An ETSI standards-compliant M2M middleware is used to aggregate the system using M2M applications developed in Python. This is to leverage the benefits of the standards-compliant middleware while offering flexibility in the design of applications. The developed system was evaluated to assess whether it meets the requirements and expectations of the various stakeholders. Finally, the performance of the proposed telemonitoring system was studied by analyzing the delay on the delivery of messages (local notifications, SMS, and email) to various stakeholders to assess the contribution towards reducing the overall time of the cardiac arrest chain of survival. The results obtained showed a marked improvement (over 28 seconds) on previous work. In addition to improved performance in monitoring and management of vital signs, telemonitoring systems have a potential of decongesting health institutions and saving time for all the stakeholders while bridging most of the gaps discussed above. The captured data can also provide the health researchers and physicians with most of the prerequisite data to effectively execute predictive health thereby improving service delivery in the health sector

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’

Pattern detection platform using disruptive technologies to improve people’s daily tasks

Tesis por compendio de publicaciones[ES] En los últimos años la miniaturización de los dispositivos electrónicos y el abaratamiento de los procesos de fabricación de los componentes ha permitido que las redes de sensores inalámbricas sean cada vez mas importantes y se empleen en multitud de casos. Adicionalmente, y debido en parte a la mejora en cuanto a las capacidades de almacenamiento y procesamiento de datos se refiere, ha permitido construir sistemas sensibles al contexto en áreas como la medicina, la monitorización o la robótica que permiten hacer un análisis detallado y adaptable de los procesos y servicios que se pueden proporcionar a los usuarios. Esta tesis doctoral ha sido conformada mediante un “Compendio de Artículos” donde se analiza la aplicación de paradigmas de inteligencia artificial en 3 casos de estudio claramente diferenciados. Se ha planteado un novedoso sistema de localización en interiores que hace uso de técnicas bayesianas y fingerprinting, con objeto de automatizar y facilitar los procesos de adquisición de datos de calibración. A mayores, se presenta un exoesqueleto que es conectado a una arquitectura sensible al contexto con objeto de que los pacientes de rehabilitación hagan ejercicios de forma interactiva y haciendo uso de técnicas de realidad aumentada. En el último artículo, se hace hincapié en el diseño de una plataforma que hace uso de las redes inalámbricas de sensores, con objeto de monitorizar el estado de los aseos mediante la incorporación de agentes embebidos en dispositivos limitados computacionalmente. Esta información descentralizada es analizada con objeto de detectar posibles anomalías y facilitar la toma de decisiones. Uno de los principales hitos que se pretende con el estudio, es mostrar a la comunidad científica los diferentes resultados que se han obtenido en la investigación, solventando problemas cotidianos que han sido resueltos mediante la modelización de los casos de estudio mediante la utilización de arquitecturas multi-agente y sistemas expertos. El filtrado de señales, la utilización de clasificadores, minería de datos y la utilización de otras técnicas de Inteligencia Artificial han sido empleadas para la consecución exitosa de este trabajo

Management And Security Of Multi-Cloud Applications

Single cloud management platform technology has reached maturity and is quite successful in information technology applications. Enterprises and application service providers are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud strategy to reduce the risk of cloud service provider lock-in and cloud blackouts and, at the same time, get the benefits like competitive pricing, the flexibility of resource provisioning and better points of presence. Another class of applications that are getting cloud service providers increasingly interested in is the carriers\u27 virtualized network services. However, virtualized carrier services require high levels of availability and performance and impose stringent requirements on cloud services. They necessitate the use of multi-cloud management and innovative techniques for placement and performance management. We consider two classes of distributed applications – the virtual network services and the next generation of healthcare – that would benefit immensely from deployment over multiple clouds. This thesis deals with the design and development of new processes and algorithms to enable these classes of applications. We have evolved a method for optimization of multi-cloud platforms that will pave the way for obtaining optimized placement for both classes of services. The approach that we have followed for placement itself is predictive cost optimized latency controlled virtual resource placement for both types of applications. To improve the availability of virtual network services, we have made innovative use of the machine and deep learning for developing a framework for fault detection and localization. Finally, to secure patient data flowing through the wide expanse of sensors, cloud hierarchy, virtualized network, and visualization domain, we have evolved hierarchical autoencoder models for data in motion between the IoT domain and the multi-cloud domain and within the multi-cloud hierarchy

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

Event-driven Middleware for Body and Ambient Sensor Applications

Continuing development of on-body and ambient sensors has led to a vast increase in sensor-based assistance and monitoring solutions. A growing range of modular sensors, and the necessity of running multiple applications on the sensor information, has led to an equally extensive increase in efforts for system development. In this work, we present an event-driven middleware for on-body and ambient sensor networks allowing multiple applications to define information types of their interest in a publish/subscribe manner. Incoming sensor data is hereby transformed into the required data representation which lifts the burden of adapting the application with respect to the connected sensors off the developer's shoulders. Furthermore, an unsupervised on-the-fly reloading of transformation rules from a remote server allows the system's adaptation to future applications and sensors at run-time as well as reducing the number of connected sensors. Open communication channels distribute sensor information to all interested applications. In addition to that, application-specific event channels are introduced that provide tailor-made information retrieval as well as control over the dissemination of critical information. The system is evaluated based on an Android implementation with transformation rules implemented as OSGi bundles that are retrieved from a remote web server. Evaluation shows a low impact of running the middleware and the transformation rules on a phone and highlights the reduced energy consumption by having fewer sensors serving multiple applications. It also points out the behavior and limits of the open and application-specific event channels with respect to CPU utilization, delivery ratio, and memory usage. In addition to the middleware approach, four (preventive) health care applications are presented. They take advantage of the mediation between sensors and applications and highlight the system's capabilities. By connecting body sensors for monitoring physical and physiological parameters as well as ambient sensors for retrieving information about user presence and interactions with the environment, full-fledged health monitoring examples for monitoring a user throughout the day are presented. Vital parameters are gathered from commercially available biosensors and the mediator device running both the middleware and the application is an off-the-shelf smart phone. For gaining information about a user's physical activity, custom-built body and ambient sensors are presented and deployed

The 2nd International Electronic Conference on Applied Sciences

This book is focused on the works presented at the 2nd International Electronic Conference on Applied Sciences, organized by Applied Sciences from 15 to 31 October 2021 on the MDPI Sciforum platform. Two decades have passed since the start of the 21st century. The development of sciences and technologies is growing ever faster today than in the previous century. The field of science is expanding, and the structure of science is becoming ever richer. Because of this expansion and fine structure growth, researchers may lose themselves in the deep forest of the ever-increasing frontiers and sub-fields being created. This international conference on the Applied Sciences was started to help scientists conduct their own research into the growth of these frontiers by breaking down barriers and connecting the many sub-fields to cut through this vast forest. These functions will allow researchers to see these frontiers and their surrounding (or quite distant) fields and sub-fields, and give them the opportunity to incubate and develop their knowledge even further with the aid of this multi-dimensional network