Introduction
This paper summarizes four papers related to Pervasive Healthcare in Smart Environment for Aged-Care in UAE. This assignment criticizes four research papers in the context and literature of the research question. This paper highlights key elements such as; aim of the study, methodology used, outcome and analysis of the paper.
- ANGELAH: a framework for assisting elders at home
Aim
The paper aims at addressing domestic safety for elders. It is because there is an increase in injuries and deaths among the elderly.
Objectives
-how can we detect and monitor possible dangerous situations?
-how can we improve emergency response and detection?
Methodology
This research paper presents AssistiNG Elders At Home (ANGELAH) framework; it is a middleware-level solution able to:
-detecting possible dangerous situations for the elderly
-composing emergency groups of caregivers and volunteers, allocated in the nearby and willing to help in emergency event cases
Outcomes
The ANGELAH peculiarity is the full integration between monitoring and sensing technologies used to detect possible dangerous situations for the elderly; groupware collaboration supports enables coordination among willing responders to engage in elder assistance. In the case of emergency situations, in-house safety support available typically permit alertly to health authorities. Passing-by people and neighbors can play a crucial role in emergency situations. Novel communication solutions should propose and stimulate proactively collaboration among the potential helpers who are co-located with the elderly in need of help. It is based on the typical locations of the helpers and their skills. They can form assistance groups, should notify clearly helper community members about situations occurring, inform helpers on the activities to perform by supporting them in collaborative assignment and definition of assistance tasks, and via synchronization should coordinate their activities and data sharing, tailored dynamically to group participants and also to the degree of criticality of the situation of the elderly (Tarik et al., 2009).
Paper analysis
This paper focuses on devising a middleware called ANGELAH that can be used to support the elderly at home. This paper discussed issues about the elderly support group formation and adequate solutions proposed. In this paper, ANGELAH framework case study was envisioned for the elders with severe vision impairments. In that case study, actuators and sensors are connected to the central unit which acts as a home network manager. It can gather and aggregate row information from detecting and sensing sources possibly dangerous situations based on computer vision. A prototype user interface was developed for the PDAs used by the responders. In that case study, ANGELAH performance was evaluated on both real network and computer simulations experiments.
2. A Mobile multi-agent based, distributed information platform (MADIP) for wide-area e-health monitoring
Aim
The aim of this paper is to examine e-health monitoring that will give a lot of convenience to elderly people in the society. It is because health monitoring traditionally has been a costly and time consuming process which requires that the patient visit hospitals frequently.
Objectives
The objective of this paper is to discuss how to revolutionize the monitoring task. The monitoring task is a relatively tedious duty for medical staff to audit and interpret simultaneously the massive information about patients during the monitoring process, performing diagnostics, and also verifying therapeutic intervention.
Methodology
This paper used Mobile multi-agent based, distribution information platform (MADIP), which is suitable to be used in networked, heterogeneous environment such as the internet to provide wide area health monitoring services.
Outcomes
The user can use their portable vital sign monitor to check their health condition. They can check temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, pulse, etc. after checking he/she can register with local agent server by use of personal digital assistant (PDA) via UIA. Then the collected physiological data is transmitted to the resource agent in a local agent server. The resource agent stores the information on the local data server, retrieves the user’s personal profile and sends a copy of the information with the diagnostic agent subsequently. The information is then checked against the profile that stores user’s criteria of abnormality. If an abnormality is detected, the diagnostic agent will immediately notify associated physician. Based on the history of medical treatment, the diagnostic agent will suggest suitable follow-up procedures by use of external services such as cellular call, SMS, and/or e-mail (Chuan Jun Su, 2008).
The user can update his/her vital signs that can be measured by activating the MADIP installed in his/her mobile device, the data is then transmitted from the vital sign monitor to the users mobile device and then displayed in UIA. Subsequently, UIA will start informing the resource agent preparing to update the user’s data. After receiving the notice from UIA, the resource agent then renew user’s data and send a copy to the diagnostic agent simultaneously with the user’s personal profile. Then the diagnostic agent prepares to examine the user’s vital sign data. In case an abnormality is detected, the diagnostic agent will report instantaneously the situation to the corresponding physician through external services (Chuan Jun Su, 2008).
Paper analysis
This paper focuses on the development of MADIP, which is very important for healthcare monitoring. From the point of view of the medical staff, workload can be reduced by substitution of routine patient supervision tasks. From the point of view of the patients, patient care can be improved by instantaneous transmit and communication between agents with reliable information and delivered in a ubiquitous manner. MADIP takes an opportunity to analyze and integrate the enormous data encountered in monitoring the patient. It not only respond to medical information inquiries on the internet relevant to an individual’s medical history but also monitor the status of the patient to alert its owner concerning unhealthy trends in addition to health record inconsistencies.
3. A Novel Middleware solution to improve Ubiquitous Healthcare Systems Aided by Affective Information
Aim
The aim of this paper is to find a way of supporting effective healthcare in ubiquitous environments.
Objectives
The objective of this paper is to provide a set of basic facilities for integrating biosensors that are wearable that can monitor psychological conditions of patients by aggregating sensed data to detect situations, prompt the patient for assistance when needed, and manage and compose groups of volunteers willing to help patients during emergency situations.
Methodology
This paper used Pervasive Environment for Affective Healthcare (PEACH). It is a context-aware middleware solution that supports and promotes the development of emotional healthcare applications for the pervasive computing environments.
Outcomes
Different forms of overheads are induced by PEACH. This paper reports the results obtained in PEACH experimentation. It discusses the responsiveness of PEACH in group formation. Responsiveness is a very important aspect. Roaming entities (RE) devices and the patient’s devices switch to the concerned Local Manager and access point upon entering the locality. When an abnormal situation is noticed by the user device, it then changes to ad hoc mode and send SOS text to portable devices discovered to nearby PEACH subscribers who can be either skilled or unskilled. RE’s devices are placed in different distances from the victim, the victims contact REs who are willing to come help the patient then report accordingly to the Surveillance Center. The Local Manager (LM) of the corresponding locality gets the information about REs unreachable through patient’s device. SC offers Call For Assistance (CFA) message to these Roaming Entities. After receiving LR’s willing confirmation about helping the patient, SC promotes proactively formation of a rescue group. Then SC uses its Proximity Service (PS) to advertise its online availability (Bottazzi et al., 2010).
The Join/Leave Manager Service (J/LMS) modules installed in the portable devices of the Local Manager sense advertisements and invite selected Local Rescuers to join the group. When a Local Rescuer joins the new group, via Join/Leave Manager Service, View Manager Service (VMS) provides to the group a view of LR’s current location, profile information, estimated arrival time to the scene.
Paper analysis
This paper focuses on the healthcare services for monitored subjects who require novel group management solutions. This paper proposed PEACH, a novel framework for quickly managing and formulating ad hoc rescue groups in a location so that they can provide life-saving assistance and perform rescue operations to the victim. PEACH considers functions that are probabilistic of roaming victims’ affective and physiological for detecting potential emergency situations. The sensors deployed in the patient’s Body Area Network (BAN) gather, aggregate raw information, and then channel them to the devices used by the victims. The aggregate context information is then compared with profile information of the patient stored previously to detect potential hazardous situations. Through simulations and practical bed test, this paper has evaluated PEACH performance in terms of battery consumption, responsiveness, and rescuers’ devices memory use.
4. Enable Pervasive Healthcare through Continuous Remote Health Monitoring.
Aim
The aim of this paper is to analyze a novel Remote Health Monitoring (RHM) system so as to enable pervasive healthcare services of high quality to users with reduced costs and low delivery delay
Objectives
The objective is to visualize a typical Remote Health Monitoring (RHM) system with the architecture of three domains namely: networking and communication domain, body area domain, and service domain.
Methodology
The methodology used is three-tier Remote Health Monitoring (RHM) architecture and considerations for system design.
Outcomes
The number of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) defines body area domain, each corresponding to the user. WBAN is composed of a gateway and a few sensors. The body sensors are categorized into two groups; ambient sensors and body sensors. Body sensors are the important parts of WBAN. These sensors are placed on, in, or around the body of the user for continuous monitoring of the physiological conditions of the user such as body temperatures and heart rate. Ambient sensors are optional; they are deployed in users surrounding and monitor the user’s body environmental conditions such as humidity, air temperature, and brightness. Physiological conditions measured by body sensors provide supplementary information that is valuable for treatment and medical diagnosis. All the sensors are interconnected and transmit sensory data to the gateway that can be a portable device like a mobile phone held by the user. Various types of sensory data are combined by the gateway and report them via networking and communication domain to an online RHM server which is in the service domain (Xiaohui et al., 2013).
Networking and communication domain major functionality is to bridge the service domain and the body area domain. Wireless communication technologies such as WiMAX, 3G, and WiFilink WBAN gateways to the internet and enables mutual data communication that is efficient between an online RHM server in service domain and body area domain. Information related to health can be accessed easily by users or authorized parties, with an online server as a data sink, whenever they are connected to the internet. It also serves as a platform for dissemination of local information. In emergency situations like stroke, nearby handheld devices and WBAN spontaneously form a mobile ad hoc network. This network is used by users to distribute help calls in their corresponding user’s vicinity, with the hope that there are healthcare workers nearby who can provide medical care immediately. Therefore, ad hoc networking function can save lives in healthcare professional dispatched by RHM server is too far from emergency locations and cannot get there in time (Xiaohui et al., 2013).
Paper analysis
This paper focuses on introducing a new Remote Health Monitoring system which provides continuous and pervasive healthcare to users. The paper has envisioned Remote Health Monitoring architecture with three domains; networking and communication domain, body area domain and service domain. For each domain, the paper has investigated and identified certain research and operational concerns for implementation. The paper also surveyed RHM products in the market and also compared their characteristics. It also determined several outstanding research challenges related to the device advancement, communications and issues of privacy and security.
References
Taleb T, Bottazzi D, Guizani M., & Nait-Charif H. (2009) ANGELAH: a framework for assisting elders at home. Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Journal on 27 (4), 480-494
Chuan-Jun Su. (2008) Mobile multi-agent based, distributed information platform (MADIP) for wide-area e-health monitoring. Computers in Industry 59(1): 55-68
Taleb T, Bottazzi D & Nasser N (2010) A novel middleware solution to improve ubiquitous healthcare systems aided by affective information. Information Technology in Biomedicine, IEEE Transactions on 14 (2), 335-349
Liang X, Li X, Barua M, Chen L, Shen XS, & Luo HY (2013) Enable Pervasive Healthcare through Continuous Remote Health Monitoring
