Internet of Things in Emergency Medical Care and Services

Emergency care is a critical area of medicine whose outcomes are influenced by the time, availability, and accuracy of contextual information. In addition, the success of emergency care depends on the quality and accuracy of the information received during the emergency call and data collected during the emergency transportation. The success of a follow medical treatment at an emergency care unit depends too on data collected during the two phases: emergency call and transport. However, most information received during an emergency-call is inaccurate and the process of information collection, storage, processing, and retrieval, during an emergency-transportation, is remaining manual and time-consuming. Emergency doctors mostly lack patient’s health records and base the medical treatment on a set of collected information including information provided by the patient or his relatives. Hence, the emergency care delivery is more patient-centered than patient-centric information. Wireless body area network and Internet of Technology (IoT) enable accurate collection of data and are increasingly used in medical applications. This chapter discusses the challenges facing the emergency medical care services delivery, especially in the developing countries. It presents and discusses an IoT platform for a patient-centric-information-based emergency care services delivery. The study is focused on a case of road traffic injury. Results of conducted experiments are discussed

IoT-Enabled Health Monitoring and Assistive Systems for in Place Aging Dementia Patient and Elderly

Hospitals and nursing care homes are facing severe challenges such as lack of skilled workforces and cost explosion, among others. Especially, the western healthcare systems are headed over a cliff. German nursing care houses, hospitals, and government are working hard on solutions to overcome the crucial workforce’s crises. Therefore, they are planning to hire nursing-workforces from abroad. They would also like to motivate families with monetary incentives, such as tax-reduction, if they can care for their elderly and/or dementia family members at home. However, caring for a sick person at home is challenging for a working family member especially in the case the patient requests around-the-clock nursing care since elderly with cognitive impairments, people with physical disabilities, and people with dementia need (medical) assistance around the clock. The present study reveals an increasing tendency for family members to care for their sick family member at home despite the challenges and issues faced like the lack of time to intensively care for the sick person due to today’s family lifestyle, challenging employment market, financial constraints, etc. The study reported in this chapter aims at providing family members willing to care for their sick member at home as long as possible with smart home automation enabled Patient@Home solution to effectively and efficiently care for their sick member despite working full time. People living in nursing care homes can also take benefit of the proposed system. Evidence shows the potential of the proposed system to effectively and efficiently assist in caring for people requesting nursing care around the clock. Though the health-related quality of life is positively impacted, patient’s satisfaction is increased (better quality of experience)

Access to Opioids in Palliative Care in Low-and Middle-Income Countries : The Case of Burkina-Faso -How Can Blockchain and Internet of Things Assist? –

Background: People requesting palliative care or suffering from pain are subjected to adhere to opioid-based treatment in order to alleviate their pain. Commonly, access to opioids is strictly controlled. Access to Healthcare delivery services remains challenging in Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC). In Burkina-Faso (BF), a Sub-Saharan African (SSA) country, patients requiring palliative care (PC) are especially facing poor access to pain drugs such as morphine. Facing poor access to pain-alleviating medicine can severely impact the daily quality of life (QoL). On one hand, patients are experiencing poor opioids access. On another hand opioids abuse, leading to drug addiction is noticed. The question arising here is how can they face poor access and at the same time abuse the given drug? One plausible answer is the counterfeit chain, which provides illegal drugs. Beyond the counterfeit issues faced, the public health care system is also facing, amongst others, prescription falsification, fraud in the distribution, and stock shortage. Method & Design:  Mixed-Method-Design was applied to this study. National stipulations, regulations, and the state-of-the-art in the field of palliative care in BF were investigated and analyzed. Based on the investigation‘s outcomes and following the paradigm of design science research, and information system based improvement solution is proposed to tackle the poor access to opioids, improve the supply and distribution chain as well as to efficiently monitor the consumption of opioids in BF, and prevent patients from any health issues, drug addiction, and death. Objectives: The main objectives are to fight against opioid addiction, counterfeits, a stock shortage, and prevent related health safety issues. The main aim is to enable the traceability of any opioids prescription, secure the supply and distribution, and thus early detect any fraud in the system. This editorial paper would, therefore, focus on investigating the reasons underlying the poor access to opioids in palliative care in BF and make suggestions for improvement. A blockchain (BC) and the Internet of Things (IoT) based system to secure and improve opioids supply, distribution, and prescription will be proposed. Results: The contribution analysis reveals the potential of the proposed model to assist in many ways to improve access to opioids and to secure this access. The model could contribute to preventing drug abuse, overprescription, supporting off-label-use of opioids and thus providing a knowledge database for off-label use of opioids. This model shows promise to deliver accurate data and information about the exact opioid’s needs and consumption atlas. This will assist to better distribute the product in the entire country. A proof-of-concept of the proposed model is required. This is ongoing and will be presented in a forthcoming paper. Conclusion: This editorial paper investigates access to opioids in Burkina Faso. It pointed out by analyzing out the computer science perspectives the different causes of the crisis. A contextualized model is provided. A test in situ needs to be performed

Primary Health-Care Service Delivery and Accessibility in the Digital Age

The primary care is within a health-care system, the first contact and main point for people requiring health and medical care. Patients requiring specialized health and medical care are directed to the appropriate specialists by a general physician (GP) who coordinates the needed specialist care. GPs base their decisions partially on patient-centered information and partially on the results of medical examinations. Many health-IT systems for primary health care are available today. Their first aims are to assist GPs in their daily duties and the patient in collecting his medical data and to self-manage his conditions. IT systems enabling the patient to collect accurate information on his condition to self-manage his condition provide accurate patient-centric data, which shows the potential to outperform patient-centered information, which in turn is based on the patient’s personal feeling and perception. Patient-centered information are biased. Beyond providing patient-centric information, health-IT systems can facilitate access to health-care services, increase the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of health-care services, and can contribute to reducing medical expenses. This chapter aims to paint down the global trend of health-IT systems and the supporting technology. The chapter will further present some existing health-IT systems and discuss their role in the health-care accessibility, particularly in rural regions

ICT-Systeme zur Verbesserung der Gesundheitsversorgung in den Gesundheitssystemen der afrikanischen Entwicklungsländer. : Fallstudien: Benin

Vergleicht man, die verschiedenen afrikanischen Gesundheitssysteme mit- und untereinander mit Hilfe der Case Study Forschungsmethodologie, so ergibt sich eine große Ähnlichkeit in vielen Bereichen, wie z. B. Alltagsprobleme, Struktur und Organisation des Sektors, etc. (Kapitel 3). Dieser Teil der vorliegenden Arbeit fokussiert auf die Struktur, die Organisation und die Alltagsprobleme im Gesundheitssystem in Benin (Kapitel 2). Insbesondere wurde die Gesundheitspolitik, deren Gesetze und Verordnungen, und die Finanzierung des Gesundheitssystems sowie der aktuelle Stand der Technik und der technischen Infrastruktur des Landes untersucht. Ferner ist der Nutzungsgrad von ICT-Systemen (engl. Information and Communication Technologies) ermittelt worden. Die Untersuchungsergebnisse werden ausführlich besprochen und analysiert, und es wird ein Fazit gezogen. Bei den Untersuchungen und der Analyse der verschiedenen Ergebnisse sind alle Akteure des Gesundheitssystems in Benin berücksichtigt worden. Die Alltagsprobleme sind je nach Akteur im System unterschiedlich, und sind deshalb unter verschiedenen Aspekten untersucht und analysiert worden

Quinine-Resistant Malaria in Traveler Returning from Senegal, 2007

We describe clinical and parasitologic features of in vivo and in vitro Plasmodium falciparum resistance to quinine in a nonimmune traveler who returned to France from Senegal in 2007 with severe imported malaria. Clinical quinine failure was associated with a 50% inhibitory concentration of 829 nmol/L. Increased vigilance is required during treatment follow-up

A review about Technology in mental health sensing and assessment

Information and communication technologies (ICT) such as smart devices, the Internet of Things and wireless sensor networks are gradually being introduced into the health system for early diagnosis and management of certain diseases. The state of the art of the use of these technologies in mental health identified 37 articles published in indexed high impact journals in the period 2003-2021. The snowball sampling method was used to select these papers. From this literature review, it appears that several of these technologies are used to support the early detection of mental disorders. Various systems based on wearable sensor networks, the Internet of Things and pervasive and ubiquitous computing have been designed and implemented in this sense. However, most of the applications are designed for academic purposes. 29% of the papers deal with the use of mobile technology in the detection of mental illness, while 67% have studied other technologies such as wearable sensor networks. 4% of the papers concern the use of web platforms in the detection and assessment of mental health disorders

Predicting telemedicine system user satisfaction in sub-Saharan Africa

During our literature review and on-site research in developing countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, we could not point out any efforts to measure the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) provided by telemedicine systems, thus making it impossible to understand their overall levels of user satisfaction in sub-Saharan African countries. Therefore, we conducted a qualitative and quantitative study, with experiments to measure QoS performance and the end-user QoE perception of telemedicine systems. Based on obtained results, we propose a mathematical formula to predict the QoE based on QoS measurement values, since a known relationship exists between QoS and QoE

Survey on Monitoring and Quality Controlling of the Mobile Biosignal Delivery

A Mobile Patient Monitoring System (MPMS) acquires patient’s biosignals and transmits them using wireless network connection to the decision-making module or healthcare professional for the assessment of patient’s condition. A variety of wireless network technologies such as wireless personal area networks (e.g., Bluetooth), mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET), and infrastructure-based networks (e.g., WLAN and cellular networks) are in practice for biosignals delivery. The wireless network quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of biosignals delivery are mainly specified in terms of required bandwidth, acceptable delay, and tolerable error rate. An important research challenge in the MPMS is how to satisfy QoS requirements of biosignals delivery in the environment characterized by patient mobility, deployment of multiple wireless network technologies, and variable QoS characteristics of the wireless networks. QoS requirements are mainly application specific, while available QoS is largely dependent on QoS provided by wireless network in use. QoS provisioning refers to providing support for improving QoS experience of networked applications. In resource poor conditions, application adaptation may also be required to make maximum use of available wireless network QoS. This survey paper presents a survey of recent developments in the area of QoS provisioning for MPMS. In particular, our contributions are as follows: (1) overview of wireless networks and network QoS requirements of biosignals delivery; (2) survey of wireless networks’ QoS performance evaluation for the transmission of biosignals; and (3) survey of QoS provisioning mechanisms for biosignals delivery in MPMS. We also propose integrating end-to-end QoS monitoring and QoS provisioning strategies in a mobile patient monitoring system infrastructure to support optimal delivery of biosignals to the healthcare professionals