A rapidly moving target: Conformance with e-health standards for mobile computing

The rapid adoption and evolution of mobile applications in health is posing significant challenges in terms of standards development, standards adoption, patient safety, and patient privacy. This is a complex continuum to navigate. There are many competing demands from the standards development process, to the use by clinicians and patients. In between there are compliance and conformance measures to be defined to ensure patient safety, effective use with integration into clinical workflow, and the protection of data and patient privacy involved in data collection and exchange. The result is a composite and intricate mixture of stakeholders, legislation, and policy together with national and individual perspectives. The challenges for standards development are numerous and include the cross over from traditional medical devices and mobile devices with apps, as well as harmonisation for consistent semantic terminology, and the diverse range of standards required in mobile health solutions. These issues affect the ability of conformance and compliance to be undertaken. Additionally, the need for interoperability in development of safe and secure mHealth software whilst being mindful of the implications for patient safety is vital. Conformance and compliance to established international standards is the first and, at present, the only step in meeting the mobile health challenges

A rapidly moving target: Conformance with e-health standards for mobile computing

The rapid adoption and evolution of mobile applications in health is posing significant challenges in terms of standards development, standards adoption, patient safety, and patient privacy. This is a complex continuum to navigate. There are many competing demands from the standards development process, to the use by clinicians and patients. In between there are compliance and conformance measures to be defined to ensure patient safety, effective use with integration into clinical workflow, and the protection of data and patient privacy involved in data collection and exchange. The result is a composite and intricate mixture of stakeholders, legislation, and policy together with national and individual perspectives. The challenges for standards development are numerous and include the cross over from traditional medical devices and mobile devices with apps, as well as harmonisation for consistent semantic terminology, and the diverse range of standards required in mobile health solutions. These issues affect the ability of conformance and compliance to be undertaken. Additionally, the need for interoperability in development of safe and secure mHealth software whilst being mindful of the implications for patient safety is vital. Conformance and compliance to established international standards is the first and, at present, the only step in meeting the mobile health challenges

Rationale and Architecture Principles for Medical Application Platforms

The concept of “system of systems” architecture is increasingly prevalent in many critical domains. Such systems allow information to be pulled from a variety of sources, analyzed to discover correlations and trends, stored to enable realtime and post-hoc assessment, mined to better inform decisionmaking, and leveraged to automate control of system units. In contrast, medical devices typically have been developed as monolithic stand-alone units. However, a vision is emerging of a notion of a medical application platform (MAP) that would provide device and health information systems (HIS) interoperability, safety critical network middleware, and an execution environment for clinical applications (“apps”) that offer numerous advantages for safety and effectiveness in health care delivery. In this paper, we present the clinical safety/effectiveness and economic motivations for MAPs, and describe key characteristics of MAPs that are guiding the search for appropriate technology, regulatory, and ecosystem solutions. We give an overview of the Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) – one particular achitecture for MAPs, and the Medical Device Coordination Framework – a prototype implementation of the ICE architecture

Business Case and Technology Analysis for 5G Low Latency Applications

A large number of new consumer and industrial applications are likely to change the classic operator's business models and provide a wide range of new markets to enter. This article analyses the most relevant 5G use cases that require ultra-low latency, from both technical and business perspectives. Low latency services pose challenging requirements to the network, and to fulfill them operators need to invest in costly changes in their network. In this sense, it is not clear whether such investments are going to be amortized with these new business models. In light of this, specific applications and requirements are described and the potential market benefits for operators are analysed. Conclusions show that operators have clear opportunities to add value and position themselves strongly with the increasing number of services to be provided by 5G.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

An All-in-One mHealth Application: #Beats – Your health mate

Màster en Gestió de Continguts Digitals, Facultat d'Informació i Mitjans Audiovisuals, Universitat de Barcelona i UPF, curs 2019-2020. Tutor: Dr. Cristóbal Urbano. UBBy exploring the current situation of the mHealth market in Spain, and the feasibility of the open-source framework, this article looks forward to developing an all-in-one mHealth application with the concept of Mini Programs/ Instant App. It can integrate the healthcare resources and provide users with more experience of instant services without a complicated installation process. It also strengthens the protection of personal information and privacy. In the meanwhile, by applying the methodology of Rapid Prototyping, a user interface of this app, Beats, will be presented to visualize the above concepts. It may be a revolution for medical providers, doctor-patient relationships, public health care systems, and even the entire healthcare system

Platforms and Protocols for the Internet of Things

Building a general architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a very complex task, exacerbated by the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we identify the main blocks of a generic IoT architecture, describing their features and requirements, and analyze the most common approaches proposed in the literature for each block. In particular, we compare three of the most important communication technologies for IoT purposes, i.e., REST, MQTT, and AMQP, and we also analyze three IoT platforms: openHAB, Sentilo, and Parse. The analysis will prove the importance of adopting an integrated approach that jointly addresses several issues and is able to flexibly accommodate the requirements of the various elements of the system. We also discuss a use case which illustrates the design challenges and the choices to make when selecting which protocols and technologies to use

Smart cards: State-of-the-art to future directions

The evolution of smart card technology provides an interesting case study of the relationship and interactions between security and business requirements. This paper maps out the milestones for smart card technology, discussing at each step the opportunities and challenges. The paper reviews recently proposed innovative ownership/management models and the security challenges associated with them. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible future directions for the technology, and the challenges these present