Sensing textiles as part of your Mobile Body Area Network system.

Sensoring your body while doing everything you are used to do. Is this possible? Comfortable smart clothes that monitor the wearer’s heart, breathing and body temperature promise to revolutionise healthcare by allowing patients to lead there normal lives.

Unlike many remote health monitoring systems that rely on sensors strapped to users’ arms or chests connected by wires to bulky equipment, a Greece team from the Sotiria General Chest Diseases Hospital in Athens, has embedded sensing devices directly into textiles, creating garments that are not only smart but also comfortable and practical to wear. Data from the biosignals collected by the clothes is then sent via a mobile connection to caregivers, allowing doctors to check up on their patients and warning if their health deteriorates.

Whereas other remote monitoring systems require different sensors linked to different transmission devices, the HealthWear system collects all the information from the sensors into a single device called a Portable Patient Unit (PPU). The embedded sensors include a six-lead electrocardiograph (ECG), respiration movement, pulse rate and skin temperature monitors, in addition to an external oximeter to measure blood oxygen saturation and a 3D accelerometer inside the PPU to measure body position. The data are then transmitted via a secure GPRS mobile connection to a central server.

“The information is stored on a patient’s electronic health record and can be accessed via a secure TCP/IP internet connection by doctors and caregivers, in either near real-time or off-line mode,” explains Alexis Milsis, a research engineer at the Sotiria e-Health Unit.

Caregivers, meanwhile, can easily access patients’ data, allowing them to visualise the patients’ progress accurately over time and even monitor their data in real time. This feature allows doctors to perform remote checkups by speaking with the patient via a videophone and instructing them to perform different exercises while they monitor their ECG and oximetry readings.

MHealth business models changing.

The business models for wireless based healthcare are fluid. eHealth style services are online but should the system enable the patient to manage their own health on there health portal? The UK NHSDirect has been set up and the Danish healthcare uses Sundhed.dk

Most ehealth services around the world adhere to a version of the model here on the right. Healthcare providers aspire to a more complex ehealth model. One in which all information flows are automated, data is held centrally and surgery, like other procedures that require physical contact with the patient, is carried out in special treatment centres. See the advanced eHealth Model on the left.

The Sundhed portal, as it is based on IBM’s WebSphere platform, could eventually act as a front end for the disease and public health monitoring applications. However the healthcare IT world has changed by the emergence of Google and Microsoft as potential suppliers of personal healthcare record vendors. IBM has itself acknowledged as much and is now, via the Continua Alliance, working with Google.

The idea that Microsoft and Google are merely a pair of disruptive new players in a healthcare market, where the incumbents cannot provide the tools that enable consumers to manage their own health, is a bit too simplistic. The threat to established healthcare providers is far more subtle than a direct and open attack on their business models. At first viewing, the threat appears to be from Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault themselves. However it is the ease to connect to there platform, hand out free of charge, to new entrants to the healthcare market that will create an enormous driving force.

As the ehealth developers armed with Google and Microsoft SDKs take healthcare into the clouds next generation healthcare providers will be start to use the disease knowledge-base their users construct to force the pharma industry into deals. In some cases these deals will disadvantage incumbent healthcare providers. This means that when, with the help of Google and Microsoft, cloud based ehealth providers start establishing themselves in the healthcare market the demise of the incumbent providers will be quick.

Cyclists turn into mHealth-stations.

Mobile Health is concerned with your wellbeing. There are many programs monitoring the state of your physical body. But what about prehealth-care? Cyclists and pedestrians will become mobile pollution detectors in an initiative launched by Imperial College London.

Teams of cyclists and pedestrians are wearing sensors to measure air and noise pollution in four British cities. These mobile data collectors will help government-backed researchers pinpoint “pollution hot spots” and develop new policies for managing air quality.

The pocket-sized sensors can detect up to five different types of vehicle emissions at a time, then transmit data to Imperial College London via mobile phone. Imperial College researchers will track measurements and sensor movement on Google maps. Additional sensors mounted on traffic signals and street lamps will help the researchers make 3-D models of pollution clouds to determine if traffic signal patterns have an effect on air quality.

The three-year project, called Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across Grid Environments, or MESSAGE, involves 100 mobile and stationary sensors in Gateshead, Cambridge and Leicester, England, as well as the South Kensington district of London.

Ten features that make a tablet PC a unique device.

And here they are:

1. Write on the screen and draw figures and diagrams when taking notes. Use different color pens, circle things and draw arrows to indicate relationships and to mock up flow diagrams.
2. The interface is more personable and less intrusive. Comfortably hold the tablet and look at the person in the face.
   
3. Use it when standing, so it provides tremendous flexibility taking notes at the bedside.
4. Get a full keyboard when needed or swivel the screen.
5. While in a meeting, you can easily get away with a tablet.
6. You can be more efficient and faster navigating an electronic health record (EHR) that’s optimized for pen-based computing.
   
7. Using handwriting recognition forces to improve and maintain a certain quality of handwriting clarity.
   
8. Showin g patients diagrams, pictures, etc. to others.
   
9. It’s so natural to use the pen to scroll and “flip” through pages like a book while reading.
   
10. It invaluable on a plane and the person in front of you reclines and diminishes your workspace.

mHealth keeps them rolling.

Toyota announced that they have developed a thought-controlled wheelchair.  Honda has also developed a system that allows a person to control a robot through thoughts. Is the automotive industry coming to the health sector? Everything that’s rolling looks interesting now. See one of my last post.

Both companies continue to invest in innovation, science and engineering. The story of a bad economy and bad sales for a year or two is what you read in most newspapers. The story of why Toyota and Honda will be dominant companies 20 years from now is their superior management and focus on long term success instead of short term quarterly results.

The BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center, along with Japanese government research institute, RIKEN, and Genesis Research Institute, has succeeded in developing a system which utilizes one of the fastest technologies in the world, controlling a wheelchair using brain waves in as little as 125 milliseconds (one millisecond, or ms, is equal to 1/1000 seconds.

Plans are underway to utilize this technology in a wide range of applications centered on medicine and nursing care management. R&D under consideration includes increasing the number of commands given and developing more efficient dry electrodes. So far the research has centered on brain waves related to imaginary hand and foot control. However, through further measurement and analysis it is anticipated that this system may be applied to other types of brain waves generated by various mental states and emotions.

Hope Phones for mHealth in Africa.

FrontlineSMS:Medic is a realy interesting initiative started by post-grad students out of Stanford University. They are the type of entrepreneurial digital natives that buck tradition and do something different, something that actually works. So what do the do? First was a rich text service. Now it’s the introduction of the HopePhone.

That team has built a major campaign, Hope Phones, to gather unused and discarded mobile phone handsets and convert them into funds for use in their mobile health campaigns in Malawi and elsewhere in Africa.

“Hope Phones will make use of the nearly 450,000 cell phones discarded every day in the US. HopePhones.org allows donors to print a free shipping label and send their old phone in to The Wireless Source, a global leader in wireless device recycling. The phone’s value allows FrontlineSMS:Medic to purchase usable, recycled cell phones for healthcare workers.”

This is a fundraising campaign, one put in place to promote a project that already has a track record of working.

Get involved:
1. Visit www.HopePhones.org and donate your old phones.
2. Spread the word:

• Email your friends, family, classmates and coworkers.
• Post on Facebook and become a fan of the Hope Phones page.
• Tell the world on Twitter – use #HopePhones as a tag so we can thank you.
• Let us know if you want the Hope Phones widget for your website or blog.

3. Contact info@hopephones.org if you’d like to help set up a Hope Phones collection center.

Location Based Services in Uganda using SMS.

The Grameen Foundation on Tuesday launched the first application of its Application Laboratory (AppLab) project. It aims to use the proliferation of mobile phones in Africa as a way to get information and services to poor communities in Uganda without Internet access.

The project began 18 months ago. The Grameen Foundation has been operating a village phone service in Uganda, and had almost 50,000 people receiving “pay-by-the-minute mobile phone services. The foundation wanted to broaden into information services and it sought out Google and MTN as potential partners. They did extensive ethnographic studies to see what kinds of services the Ugandan people wanted and did pilot projects in the field to test out early versions of the services. They’re launching with a few services and hope to add more later. Eventually, they hope to branch out to other countries in Africa.

“The new services work through any phone capable of sending or receiving SMS messages”, Joseph Mucheru, Google’s director of sub-Saharan Africa business, said, adding that almost all phones in Uganda will be able to use the services. “The five applications use Google SMS Search technology and MTN’s telecom network. They include

• Farmer’s Friend, a searchable database with agricultural advice and weather forecasts.
• Health Tips with sexual and reproductive health information, paired with
• Clinic Finder, to locate nearby health clinics.
• Google Trader, which matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce, commodities and other products.

Content is provided by local partners. Marie Stopes Uganda and the Straight Talk Foundation provide health information, while the Busoga Rural Open Source Development Initiative (BRODSI) provides agricultural information created and tested by small-holder farmers.

Fall detection integrated in your body-area network.

Sensoring your condition and your balance. Not new so why the mentioning? This one is integrated in a wireless body-area network (WBAN).

Halo Monitoring is a Huntsville, AL based company, that is marketing a wearable monitoring strap that can detect falls. This is one of the leading causes of hospitalization and accident-related deaths among senior citizens. Halo Monitoring is demonstrating its myHalo system at the Healthcare Unbound conference in Seattle this week.

The user wears a washable strap with electrodes embedded in the fabric to measure heart rate, skin temperature, calorie expenditure, sleep patterns and other factors critical to the health of frail, elderly people, and is able to detect whether the wearer has fallen or is simply lying down. It transmits readings via the ZigBee standard for wireless devices, to a home “gateway” that looks like a standard wireless Internet router. The gateway connects via an existing ethernet or a standard phone line to Halo’s monitoring center, which can send immediate web, email and text alerts to concerned caregivers, or, in emergency cases, a call-center operator can contact the caregiver directly or dial 911. “If Mom doesn’t answer the phone, you can log onto our website,” President and CEO Chris Otto says.

Monitoring is automatic, so the user doesn’t have to press a panic button. The Halo system costs $65 to $99 a month, and is currently in use only in the Huntsville area, as well as in Chicago and New Jersey, where the company has marketing partners. Expect a national rollout next year, according to Otto.

Stuff that inspires your mHealth-thoughts.

Take your mobile webbrowser and Adobe-software and what do you get? Astonishing new posibilities for mHealth-services to.

iPhone hacker Chris Hughes demos an open source software project that makes creating “augmented reality” a cinch. He shows how a virtual object (like a 3D spaceship), in cahoots with live footage, can interact with the real world right through a web browser.
https://ted.com/talks/view/id/583

Here it comes: the thought-controlled homebased healthcare system.

Homeautomation is setting huge steps forward. Control with your mobile is already in place. More healthcare sensoring will be connected. What will the future bring? Scientists in London are close to perfecting a smart home system that is controlled by the user’s thoughts.

In addition to my postings last week, the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) uses electrodes attached to the scalp that allow the user to turn lights off and on, change the channel on the TV or open a door “by just thinking about it,” according to Science Daily.

g.tec, an Austrian medical engineering company, developed the (BCI) to assist the disabled. But it could have applications for the general population. g.tec teamed up with a group of international universities and research institutes as part of the EU-funded Presenccia project to incorporate its BCI technology into virtual environments. As part of the project a fully functioning smart home was created in virtual reality (VR).

“It has a kitchen, bathroom, living room… everything a normal home would have. People are able to move through it just by thinking about where they wanted to go,” Guger says. Being able to move and control objects in virtual reality solely by the power of thought could offer new and liberating possibilities for people with physical disabilities.

The electrodes are similar to the ones used by doctors for an Electroencephalogram (EEG). According to Science Daily, the BCI learns to identify the “distinctive patterns of neuronal activity produced when they imagine walking forwards, flicking on a light switch or turning up the radio.