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

E-Health: Value Proposition and Technologies Enabling Collaborative Healthcare

E-health, enabled by ubiquitous computing and communication technologies, is facilitating a fundamental shift in the age old praxis of healthcare. It is revolutionizing healthcare in the 21st century in much the same way as the arrival of modern medicine and vaccines did in the 19th century. E-health lies at the intersection of diverse disciplines including healthcare, computer science, information systems, economics, and political science. The broad impact of E-health on diverse domains, complexity of supporting technologies, and the dizzying interplay of theories bridging multiple disciplines creates a rich problem space for information system researchers and calls on to conduct cross-disciplinary research. In the current paper we present salient characteristics of e-health and discuss its value proposition. The value proposition of e-health presents the entire range of processes supporting the healthcare sector. We also present research opportunities as e-health takes center stage in the delivery of healthcare

e-ESAS: Evolution of a Participatory Design-based Solution for Breast Cancer (BC) Patients in Rural Bangladesh

Healthcare facility is scarce for rural women in the developing world. The situation is worse for patients who are suffering from diseases that require long-term feedback-oriented monitoring such as breast cancer. Lack of motivation to go to the health centers on patients’ side due to sociocultural barriers, financial restrictions and transportation hazards results in inadequate data for proper assessment. Fortunately, mobile phones have penetrated the masses even in rural communities of the developing countries. In this scenario, a mobile phone-based remote symptom monitoring system (RSMS) with inspirational videos can serve the purpose of both patients and doctors. Here, we present the findings of our field study conducted on 39 breast cancer patients in rural Bangladesh. Based on the results of extensive field studies, we have categorized the challenges faced by patients in different phases of the treatment process. As a solution, we have designed, developed and deployed e-ESAS—the first mobile-based RSMS in rural context. Along with the detail need assessment of such a system, we describe the evolution of e-ESAS and the deployment results. We have included the unique and useful design lessons that we learned as e-ESAS evolved through participatory design process. The findings show how e-ESAS addresses several challenges faced by patients and doctors and positively impact their lives

A Survey of Requirements Engineering Methods for Pervasive Services

Designing and deploying ubiquitous computing systems, such as those delivering large-scale mobile services, still requires large-scale investments in both development effort as well as infrastructure costs. Therefore, in order to develop the right system, the design process merits a thorough investigation of the wishes of the foreseen user base. Such investigations are studied in the area of requirements engineering (RE). In this report, we describe and compare three requirements engineering methods that belong to one specific form of RE, namely Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering. By mapping these methods to a common framework, we assess their applicability in the field of ubiquitous computing systems

A realisation of ethical concerns with smartphone personal health monitoring apps

The pervasiveness of smartphones has facilitated a new way in which owners of devices can monitor their health using applications (apps) that are installed on their smartphones. Smartphone personal health monitoring (SPHM) collects and stores health related data of the user either locally or in a third party storing mechanism. They are also capable of giving feedback to the user of the app in response to conditions are provided to the app therefore empowering the user to actively make decisions to adjust their lifestyle. Regardless of the benefits that this new innovative technology offers to its users, there are some ethical concerns to the user of SPHM apps. These ethical concerns are in some way connected to the features of SPHM apps. From a literature survey, this paper attempts to recognize ethical issues with personal health monitoring apps on smartphones, viewed in light of general ethics of ubiquitous computing. The paper argues that there are ethical concerns with the use of SPHM apps regardless of the benefits that the technology offers to users due to SPHM apps’ ubiquity leaving them open to known and emerging ethical concerns. The paper then propose a need further empirical research to validate the claim

Pervasive Technologies and Support for Independent Living

A broad range of pervasive technologies are used in many domains, including healthcare: however, there appears to be little work examining the role of such technologies in the home, or the different wants and needs of elderly users. Additionally, there exist ethical issues surrounding the use of highly personal healthcare-related data, and interface issues centred on the novelty of the technologies and the disabilities experienced by the users. This report examines these areas, before considering the ways in which they might come together to help support independent-living users with disabilities which may be age-related

Visualizing pain data for wheelchair users: A ubiquitous approach

Copyright @ 2005 Rinton PressWe describe a wireless enabled solution for the vizualisation of pain data. Our approach uses pain drawings to record spatial location and type of pain and enables data collection with appropriate time stamping, thus providing a means for the seldom-recorded (but often attested) time-varying nature of pain, with consequential impact on monitoring the effectiveness of patient treatment regimes. Moreover, since the implementation platform of our solution is that of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), data collection takes place ubiquitously, providing back pain sufferers with mobility problems (such as wheelchair users) with a convenient means of logging their pain data and of seamlessly uploading it to a hospital server using WiFi technology. Stakeholder results show that, notwithstanding problems related to PDA data input, our approach is generally perceived to be an easy to use and convenient solution to the challenges of anywhere/anytime data collection