Review of wireless sensors networks in health applications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are becoming increasingly important for telemedicine applications, monitoring patients both in the clinical setting and at home. They reduce user discomfort, enhance mobility and reduce costs. WSN are also fundamental in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) since these smart systems, which are tailored to users needs, collect information about users and their ambient in order to provide personalized feedback. Despite the growing use of wireless communications in the health domain and in AAL systems there is a lack of research literature reviewing trials of these technologies. This paper provides a systematic review of the use of WSN in the health domain, presenting current WSN implementations. It covers 126 papers, of which 26 are studies, classified according to inclusion criteria. There is presented a discussion about the recent research conducted in the field.Junta de Andalucía p08-TIC-363

Gamification Strategy on Prevention of STDs for Youth

Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and especially chlamydia is a worrying problem among North-Norwegian youngsters. Gamified web applications should be valued for sexual health education, and thus STDs prevention, for their potential to get users engaged and involved with their healthcare. Aiming to achieve that youngsters become more aware of STDs we have developed “sjekkdeg.no”, a gamified web application focused on sexual health targeting North-Norwegian youngsters. Gamification techniques like avatars, achievement-based gifts and social network sharing buttons have been implemented in the site that includes educational content on sexual health and a STDs symptom checker. Preliminary results show that the game-style web app could be useful to encourage users to learn more on sexual health and STDs and thus changing their risky behaviors and preventing sexually transmitted diseases

Mobile Phone Apps for Quality of Life and Well-Being Assessment in Breast and Prostate Cancer Patients: Systematic Review

Background: Mobile phone health apps are increasingly gaining attention in oncological care as potential tools for supporting cancer patients. Although the number of publications and health apps focusing on cancer is increasing, there are still few specifically designed for the most prevalent cancers diagnosed: breast and prostate cancers. There is a need to review the effect of these apps on breast and prostate cancer patients’ quality of life (QoL) and well-being. Objective: The purposes of this study were to review the scientific literature on mobile phone apps targeting breast or prostate cancer patients and involving QoL and well-being (anxiety and depression symptoms) and analyze the clinical and technological characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of these apps, as well as patients’ user experience with them. Methods: We conducted a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature from The Cochrane Library, Excerpta Medica Database, PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus, and MEDLINE to identify studies involving apps focused on breast and/or prostate cancer patients and QoL and/or well-being published between January 1, 2000, and July 12, 2017. Only trial studies which met the inclusion criteria were selected. The systematic review was completed with a critical analysis of the apps previously identified in the health literature research that were available from the official app stores. Results: The systematic review of the literature yielded 3862 articles. After removal of duplicates, 3229 remained and were evaluated on the basis of title and abstract. Of these, 3211 were discarded as not meeting the inclusion criteria, and 18 records were selected for full text screening. Finally, 5 citations were included in this review, with a total of 644 patients, mean age 52.16 years. Four studies targeted breast cancer patients and 1 focused on prostate cancer patients. Four studies referred to apps that assessed QoL. Only 1 among the 5 analyzed apps was available from the official app store. In 3 studies, an app-related intervention was carried out, and 2 of them reported an improvement on QoL. The lengths of the app-related interventions varied from 4 to 12 weeks. Because 2 of the studies only tracked use of the app, no effect on QoL or well-being was found. Conclusions: Despite the existence of hundreds of studies involving cancer-focused mobile phone apps, there is a lack of rigorous trials regarding the QoL and/or well-being assessment in breast and/or prostate cancer patients. A strong and collective effort should be made by all health care providers to determine those cancer-focused apps that effectively represent useful, accurate, and reliable tools for cancer patients’ disease management.European Union's Horizon 2020 No 72201

Indoor Position System Based on a Zigbee Network

TAIS group has developed an indoor position system prototype based on a fingerprint positioning algorithm. The prototype uses IEEE 802.15.4 mote and BitCloud Stack, a full-featured ZigBee Compliant, second generation embedded software stack from Atmel. The design requirements of the prototype were only to determine the actual position in a room of a user in a building, so the prototype accuracy is room accuracy. TAIS group decided to compete in the second edition of EvAAL Competition. This paper presents all the step made to adapt the prototype to the EvAAL environment, the found drawbacks and the obtained results. One of the most important drawback was that the Smart House Living Lab of the Polytechnic University of Madrid has only two rooms, the required accuracy was meters (error less than or equal to 0,5 meters the higher score, higher than 4 meters no score) and the room accuracy was substituted by areas of interest so the behavior of our prototype was going to work was an incognita.Junta de Andalucía p08-TIC-363

Design and Implementation of a Prototype with a Standardized Interface for Transducers in Ambient Assisted Living

Solutions in the field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) do not generally use standards to implement a communication interface between sensors and actuators. This makes these applications isolated solutions because it is so difficult to integrate them into new or existing systems. The objective of this research was to design and implement a prototype with a standardized interface for sensors and actuators to facilitate the integration of different solutions in the field of AAL. Our work is based on the roadmap defined by AALIANCE, using motes with TinyOS telosb, 6LoWPAN, sensors, and the IEEE 21451 standard protocol. This prototype allows one to upgrade sensors to a smart status for easy integration with new applications and already existing ones. The prototype has been evaluated for autonomy and performance. As a use case, the prototype has been tested in a serious game previously designed for people with mobility problems, and its advantages and disadvantages have been analysed.Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-363

The IEC-60870-5 standard for a personal server applied to telemedicine

This paper presents a proposal of a flexible telemedicine system for remote patient monitoring. It can be used in different kind of environments where there is only available low speed transmission links like Radio Frequency. This proposal includes the use of a previous work where the IEC-60870-S standard was applied to the development of an open and flexible RTU (Remote Terminal Unit) based in open hardware, a SoCtype design using a FPGA programmed with the open core LEON and open source, so both the hardware and the ISO are open source.Junta de Andalucía p08-TIC-363

A Proposal for a Robust Validated Weighted General Data Protection Regulation-based Scale to Assess the Quality of Privacy Policies of Mobile Health Applications: an eDelphi Study

Healthcare services are undergoing a digital transformation in which the Participatory Health Informatics field has a key role. Within this field, studies aimed to assess the quality of digital tools, including mHealth apps, are conducted. Privacy is one dimension of the quality of a mHealth app. Privacy consists of several components, including organizational, technical and legal safeguards. Within legal safeguards, giving transparent information to the users on how their data is handled is crucial. This information is usually disclosed to users through the privacy policy document. Assessing the quality of a privacy policy is a complex task and several scales supporting this process have been proposed in the literature. However, these scales are heterogeneous and even not very objective. In our previous study, we proposed a checklist of items guiding the assessment of the quality of a mHealth app privacy policy, based on the General Data Protection Regulation. Objective: To refine the robustness of our General Data Protection Regulation-based privacy scale to assess the quality of a mHealth app privacy policy, to identify new items, and to assign weights for every item in the scale. Methods: A two-round modified eDelphi study was conducted involving a privacy expert panel. Results: After the Delphi process, all the items in the scale were considered „important“ or „very important“ (4 and 5 in a 5-point Likert scale, respectively) by most of the experts. One of the original items was suggested to be reworded, while 8 tentative items were suggested. Only 2 of them were finally added after Round 2. 11 of the 16 items in the scale were considered „very important“ (weight of 1), while the other 5 were considered „important“ (weight of 0.5). Conclusions: The Benjumea privacy scale is a new robust tool to assess the quality of a mHealth app privacy policy, providing a deeper and complementary analysis to other scales that assesses the general quality. Also, this robust scale provides a guideline for the development of high-quality privacy policies of mHealth apps.Universidad de Sevilla and the Ministerio de Universidades of the Spanish Government under the Requalification of Spanish University System Program funded by European Union –NextGenerationEUCátedra de Telefónica “Inteligencia en la red“ of the Universidad de SevillaCátedra Indra “Sociedad Digital” of the Universidad de Sevill

Fingerprint indoor position system based on OpenMAC

This paper presents a work in progress for the developing of a fingerprint indoor position system based on OpenMAC, an IEEE 802.15.4 embedded software implementation from Atmel to be used in different scenarios like e_health, ambient living or smart building. The system is thought to work as another one that we have yet developed but using the BitCloud Stack, a full-featured, second generation embedded software stack from the same supplier, but improving it. The first steps followed up in the system development are shown in this paper.Junta de Andalucía p08-TIC-363

Open and Flexible Embedded System Applied to Positioning and Telecontrol

This paper presents the development and testing of an open and flexible embedded system applied to positioning and telecontrol (OFESAPO) for outdoor applications. The system is composed of a control center (CC) and a set of remote terminal units (RTUs); the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 60870-5 series has been chosen for communication among them. This is a standard protocol of real-time telecontrol applications. The CC is a personal computer, and the RTUs are based on open hardware and software. The RTU hardware is an embedded system, i.e., a system-on-chip-type design using fieldprogrammable gate array that has been programmed with the open-core LEON running Linux operating system. For prototyping, the GR-XC3S-1500 board has been used. As there is no open source code available for the IEC standard protocols, an open source code has also been implemented. Hence, both the hardware and the software are open source in OFESAPO. Several tests have been made to show the system’s limitations and the suitability for real-time applications. A prototype has also been tested in a real environment, where the real position of two moving RTUs was shown by a CC using Google Map.Junta de Andalucía p08-TIC-363