Medical data processing and analysis for remote health and activities monitoring

Recent developments in sensor technology, wearable computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and wireless communication have given rise to research in ubiquitous healthcare and remote monitoring of human\u2019s health and activities. Health monitoring systems involve processing and analysis of data retrieved from smartphones, smart watches, smart bracelets, as well as various sensors and wearable devices. Such systems enable continuous monitoring of patients psychological and health conditions by sensing and transmitting measurements such as heart rate, electrocardiogram, body temperature, respiratory rate, chest sounds, or blood pressure. Pervasive healthcare, as a relevant application domain in this context, aims at revolutionizing the delivery of medical services through a medical assistive environment and facilitates the independent living of patients. In this chapter, we discuss (1) data collection, fusion, ownership and privacy issues; (2) models, technologies and solutions for medical data processing and analysis; (3) big medical data analytics for remote health monitoring; (4) research challenges and opportunities in medical data analytics; (5) examples of case studies and practical solutions

Visualization of Data for Ambient Assisted Living Services

Ambient assisted living (AAL) services that provide support for people to remain in their homes are increasingly being used in healthcare systems around the world. Typically, these ambient assisted living services provide additional information though location-awareness, presence-awareness, and context-awareness capabilities, arising from the prolific use of telecommunications devices including sensors and actuators in the home of the person receiving care. In addition there is a need to provide abstract information, in context, to local and remote stakeholders. There are many different viewing options utilizing converged networks and the resulting explosion in data and information has resulted in a new problem, as these new ambient assisted living services struggle to convey meaningful information to different groups of end users. The article discusses visualization of data from the perspective of the needs of the differing end user groups, and discusses how algorithms are required to contextualize and convey information across location and time. In order to illustrate the issues, current work on nighttime AAL services for people with dementia is described

Internet of Things Architectures, Technologies, Applications, Challenges, and Future Directions for Enhanced Living Environments and Healthcare Systems: A Review

Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolution of the Internet and has been gaining increased attention from researchers in both academic and industrial environments. Successive technological enhancements make the development of intelligent systems with a high capacity for communication and data collection possible, providing several opportunities for numerous IoT applications, particularly healthcare systems. Despite all the advantages, there are still several open issues that represent the main challenges for IoT, e.g., accessibility, portability, interoperability, information security, and privacy. IoT provides important characteristics to healthcare systems, such as availability, mobility, and scalability, that o er an architectural basis for numerous high technological healthcare applications, such as real-time patient monitoring, environmental and indoor quality monitoring, and ubiquitous and pervasive information access that benefits health professionals and patients. The constant scientific innovations make it possible to develop IoT devices through countless services for sensing, data fusing, and logging capabilities that lead to several advancements for enhanced living environments (ELEs). This paper reviews the current state of the art on IoT architectures for ELEs and healthcare systems, with a focus on the technologies, applications, challenges, opportunities, open-source platforms, and operating systems. Furthermore, this document synthesizes the existing body of knowledge and identifies common threads and gaps that open up new significant and challenging future research directions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare

Night optimised care technology for users needing assisted lifestyles

There is growing interest in the development of ambient assisted living services to increase the quality of life of the increasing proportion of the older population. We report on the Night Optimised Care Technology for UseRs Needing Assisted Lifestyles project, which provides specialised night time support to people at early stages of dementia. This article explains the technical infrastructure, the intelligent software behind the decision-making driving the system, the software development process followed, the interfaces used to interact with the user, and the findings and lessons of our user-centred approach

Night optimised care technology for users needing assisted lifestyles

There is growing interest in the development of ambient assisted living services to increase the quality of life of the increasing proportion of the older population. We report on the Night Optimised Care Technology for UseRs Needing Assisted Lifestyles project, which provides specialised night time support to people at early stages of dementia. This article explains the technical infrastructure, the intelligent software behind the decision-making driving the system, the software development process followed, the interfaces used to interact with the user, and the findings and lessons of our user-centred approach

EldyIoT: IoT assistive system for elderly

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most promising technologies for the near future. IoT has penetrated many industries such as smart cities, smart homes, smart cars, healthcare, agriculture and manufacturing. In the health sector, the number of use cases has increased as a consequence of the improvement in the quality and effectiveness of the provision of hospital and care services. This work presents a solution to reduce the distance between caregivers and patients in a non-intrusive way, allowing information about the health status and mobility of patients to be available and accessible anywhere, anytime. Consecutively, it will increase the confidence of caregivers in relation to the health status of monitored patients and, on the other hand, it will increase the confidence of patients that their health status is being monitored frequently. Thus, this thesis presents a framework for physical monitoring of elderly people based on smartwatch devices. As an integral part of the solution, we present a cross-platform mobile application and a software framework assembled to support the processes of collecting, processing, storing, displaying and analyzing data.A Internet das Coisas (IoT) é uma das tecnologias mais promissoras para o futuro próximo. A IoT penetrou em muitos setores, como cidades inteligentes, casas inteligentes, carros inteligentes, saúde, agricultura e manufatura. No sector da saúde, o número de casos de uso, tem aumentado como consequência do incremento na qualidade e eficácia na prestação de serviços hospitalares e de cuidados. Este trabalho, apresenta uma solução para reduzir a distância entre cuidadores e pacientes de forma não intrusiva, permitindo que informações sobre o estado de saúde e mobilidade dos pacientes estejam disponíveis e acessíveis em qualquer lugar, e a qualquer hora. Consecutivamente, aumentará a confiança dos cuidadores em relação ao estado de saúde dos pacientes acompanhados e, por outro lado, aumentará a confiança dos pacientes de que o seu estado de saúde está a ser monitorizado com frequência. Assim, esta tese apresenta um framework para monitorização física de idosos baseada em dispositivos smartwatch. Como parte integrante da solução, apresentamos uma aplicação móvel cross-platform e uma estrutura de software montada para dar suporte aos processos de recolher, processamento, armazenamento, exibição e análise de dados

A REVIEW ON INTERNET OF THINGS ARCHITECTURE FOR BIG DATA PROCESSING

The importance of big data implementations is increased due to large amount of gathered data via the online gates. The businesses and organizations would benefit from the big data analysis i.e. analyze the political, market, and social interests of the people. The Internet of Things (IoT) presents many facilities that support the big data transfer between various Internet objects. The integration between the big data and IoT offer a lot of implementations in the daily life like GPS, Satellites, and airplanes tracking. There are many challenges face the integration between big data transfer and IoT technology. The main challenges are the transfer architecture, transfer protocols, and the transfer security. The main aim of this paper is to review the useful architecture of IoT for the purpose of big data processing with the consideration of the various requirements such as the transfer protocol. This paper also reviews other important issues such as the security requirements and the multiple IoT applications. In addition, the future directions of the IoT-Big data are explained in this paper

A Mobile Healthcare Solution for Ambient Assisted Living Environments

Elderly people need regular healthcare services and, several times, are dependent of physicians’ personal attendance. This dependence raises several issues to elders, such as, the need to travel and mobility support. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Mobile Health (m-Health) services and applications offer good healthcare solutions that can be used both on indoor and in mobility environments. This dissertation presents an ambient assisted living (AAL) solution for mobile environments. It includes elderly biofeedback monitoring using body sensors for data collection offering support for remote monitoring. The used sensors are attached to the human body (such as the electrocardiogram, blood pressure, and temperature). They collect data providing comfort, mobility, and guaranteeing efficiency and data confidentiality. Periodic collection of patients’ data is important to gather more accurate measurements and to avoid common risky situations, like a physical fall may be considered something natural in life span and it is more dangerous for senior people. One fall can out a life in extreme cases or cause fractures, injuries, but when it is early detected through an accelerometer, for example, it can avoid a tragic outcome. The presented proposal monitors elderly people, storing collected data in a personal computer, tablet, or smartphone through Bluetooth. This application allows an analysis of possible health condition warnings based on the input of supporting charts, and real-time bio-signals monitoring and is able to warn users and the caretakers. These mobile devices are also used to collect data, which allow data storage and its possible consultation in the future. The proposed system is evaluated, demonstrated and validated through a prototype and it is ready for use. The watch Texas ez430-Chronos, which is capable to store information for later analysis and the sensors Shimmer who allow the creation of a personalized application that it is capable of measuring biosignals of the patient in real time is described throughout this dissertation