Medical Signal-Conditioning and Data-Interface System

A general-purpose portable, wearable electronic signal-conditioning and data-interface system is being developed for medical applications. The system can acquire multiple physiological signals (e.g., electrocardiographic, electroencephalographic, and electromyographic signals) from sensors on the wearer s body, digitize those signals that are received in analog form, preprocess the resulting data, and transmit the data to one or more remote location(s) via a radiocommunication link and/or the Internet. The system includes a computer running data-object-oriented software that can be programmed to configure the system to accept almost any analog or digital input signals from medical devices. The computing hardware and software implement a general-purpose data-routing-and-encapsulation architecture that supports tagging of input data and routing the data in a standardized way through the Internet and other modern packet-switching networks to one or more computer(s) for review by physicians. The architecture supports multiple-site buffering of data for redundancy and reliability, and supports both real-time and slower-than-real-time collection, routing, and viewing of signal data. Routing and viewing stations support insertion of automated analysis routines to aid in encoding, analysis, viewing, and diagnosis

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

Wireless body sensor networks for health-monitoring applications

This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Physiological Measurement. The publisher is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0967-3334/29/11/R01

Learning from medical data streams: an introduction

Clinical practice and research are facing a new challenge created by the rapid growth of health information science and technology, and the complexity and volume of biomedical data. Machine learning from medical data streams is a recent area of research that aims to provide better knowledge extraction and evidence-based clinical decision support in scenarios where data are produced as a continuous flow. This year's edition of AIME, the Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, enabled the sound discussion of this area of research, mainly by the inclusion of a dedicated workshop. This paper is an introduction to LEMEDS, the Learning from Medical Data Streams workshop, which highlights the contributed papers, the invited talk and expert panel discussion, as well as related papers accepted to the main conference

A Mobile Geo-Communication Dataset for Physiology-Aware DASH in Rural Ambulance Transport

Use of telecommunication technologies for remote, continuous monitoring of patients can enhance effectiveness of emergency ambulance care during transport from rural areas to a regional center hospital. However, the communication along the various routes in rural areas may have wide bandwidth ranges from 2G to 4G; some regions may have only lower satellite bandwidth available. Bandwidth fluctuation together with real-time communication of various clinical multimedia pose a major challenge during rural patient ambulance transport.; AB@The availability of a pre-transport route-dependent communication bandwidth database is an important resource in remote monitoring and clinical multimedia transmission in rural ambulance transport. Here, we present a geo-communication dataset from extensive profiling of 4 major US mobile carriers in Illinois, from the rural location of Hoopeston to the central referral hospital center at Urbana. In collaboration with Carle Foundation Hospital, we developed a profiler, and collected various geographical and communication traces for realistic emergency rural ambulance transport scenarios. Our dataset is to support our ongoing work of proposing "physiology-aware DASH", which is particularly useful for adaptive remote monitoring of critically ill patients in emergency rural ambulance transport. It provides insights on ensuring higher Quality of Service (QoS) for most critical clinical multimedia in response to changes in patients' physiological states and bandwidth conditions. Our dataset is available online for research community.Comment: Proceedings of the 8th ACM on Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys'17), Pages 158-163, Taipei, Taiwan, June 20 - 23, 201

Affective Medicine: a review of Affective Computing efforts in Medical Informatics

Background: Affective computing (AC) is concerned with emotional interactions performed with and through computers. It is defined as “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions”. AC enables investigation and understanding of the relation between human emotions and health as well as application of assistive and useful technologies in the medical domain. Objectives: 1) To review the general state of the art in AC and its applications in medicine, and 2) to establish synergies between the research communities of AC and medical informatics. Methods: Aspects related to the human affective state as a determinant of the human health are discussed, coupled with an illustration of significant AC research and related literature output. Moreover, affective communication channels are described and their range of application fields is explored through illustrative examples. Results: The presented conferences, European research projects and research publications illustrate the recent increase of interest in the AC area by the medical community. Tele-home healthcare, AmI, ubiquitous monitoring, e-learning and virtual communities with emotionally expressive characters for elderly or impaired people are few areas where the potential of AC has been realized and applications have emerged. Conclusions: A number of gaps can potentially be overcome through the synergy of AC and medical informatics. The application of AC technologies parallels the advancement of the existing state of the art and the introduction of new methods. The amount of work and projects reviewed in this paper witness an ambitious and optimistic synergetic future of the affective medicine field