Wireless Sensor Networks and mHealth basics 2.

What standards, hardware and operating systems are  used for wireless sensor networks? There are three. I wrote some articles about ZigBee. It´s a proprietary mesh-networking specification intended for uses such as embedded sensing, medical data collection and home automation. WirelessHART is specifically designed for Industrial applications. 6LoWPAN is the IETF standards track specification. Also relevant to sensor networks is the emerging IEEE 1451 which attempts to create standards for the smart sensor market. The main point of smart sensors is to move the processing intelligence closer to the sensing device.

Hardware

The main challenge is to produce low cost and tiny sensor nodes. With respect to these objectives, current sensor nodes are mainly prototypes. Miniaturization and low cost are understood to follow from recent and future progress. Some of the existing sensor nodes are given below. Some of the nodes are still in research stage. Also inherent to sensor network adoption is the availability of a very low power method for acquiring sensor data wirelessly.

Operating systems

Operating systems for wireless sensor network nodes are typically less complex than general-purpose operating systems both because of the special requirements of sensor network applications and because of the resource constraints in sensor network hardware platforms. Wireless sensor network hardware is not different from traditional embedded systems and it is therefore possible to use embedded operating systems such as eCos or uC/OS for sensor networks. However, such operating systems are often designed with real-time properties. Unlike traditional embedded operating systems, however, operating systems specifically targeting sensor networks often do not have real-time support.

TinyOS is perhaps the first operating system specifically designed for wireless sensor networks. Unlike most other operating systems, TinyOS is based on an event-driven programming model instead of multithreading. TinyOS programs are composed into event handlers and tasks with run to completion-semantics. When an external event occurs, such as an incoming data packet or a sensor reading, TinyOS calls the appropriate event handler to handle the event. Event handlers can post tasks that are scheduled by the TinyOS kernel some time later. Both the TinyOS system and programs written for TinyOS are written in a special programming language called nesC which is an extension to the C programming language.

There are also operating systems that allow programming in C. Examples of such operating systems include Contiki, MANTIS, BTnut, SOS and Nano-RK. LiteOS is a newly developed OS for wireless sensor networks, which provides UNIX like abstraction and support for C programming language.

MHealth muscles tests more accurate.

Doctors test the strenght of intrinsic hand muscles by letting the patient pull an push at their hand and fingers. Is this an accurate methode? No, a team of bioengineering students from Rice University developed a device to measure thenar, hypothenar, interosseus and lumbrical muscles.

Graduates Caterina Kaffes, Matthew Miller, Neel Shah and Shuai “Steve” Xu invented PRIME, or Peg Restrained Intrinsic Muscle Evaluator, for their senior project. “Twenty percent of all ER admissions are hand-related. Neuromuscular disorders like spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s, diabetes, multiple sclerosis-all these diseases affect the intrinsic hand muscles,” said Xu. PRIME, was created to replace the common test. The real goal is to quantify finger/muscle strength for a more accurate diagnosis for carpal tunnel syndrome evaluation and other disorders.

“U.S. surgeons perform over 500,000 procedures for carpal tunnel each year. $2 billion per year is spent treating this disease but up to 20 percent of all surgeries need to be redone. Our invention can be used across the spectrum of care from diagnosis to outcome measurements,” said Xu.

The device has three elements: a pegboard restraint, a force transducer enclosure and a PDA custom-programmed to capture measurements. In a five-minute test, a doctor uses pegs to isolate a patient’s individual fingers. “You wouldn’t think it works as well as it does, but once you are pegged in, you can’t move anything but the finger we want you to,” Miller said. A loop is fitted around the finger, and when the patient moves it, the amount of force generated is measured. “PRIME gets the peak force,” Xu said. “Then the doctor can create a patient-specific file with all your information, time-stamped, and record every single measurement.”

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.

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.

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

Realtime mhealth monitoring slowly forward.

Begin this year there was a boost of mobile health applications and devices with some kind of sensoring. What progress is there? One of the area’s is the integration of different measurements and feedback. The Personal Health Monitor provides personalised, intelligent, non-intrusive, realtime health monitoring using wireless sensors and a mobile phone.

The wireless sensors can be either attached to the users body (for example ECG and Accelerometer) or can be external devices, such as a Blood Pressure Monitor or Weight Scale, that are used when required.

On the phone, the Personal Health Monitor software analyses, in real-time, the data received from the sensors, such as an electrocardiogram (ECG). The phone gives immediate feedback and personalised advice to the user based on the analysis of sensor data collected.

The windows-mobile application is a development of the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia and free to download. The system can also be used as a flexible Cardiac Rhythm Monitoring (CRM) system. It’s different from conventional Holter and Event monitor systems since it is not limited to just recording ECG arrhythmias but offers a range of other functionalities, that make it a personal health monitoring system for people that need to make life style changes such as lose weight or monitor their blood glucose level. The application can detect and record various arrhythmias and can react to serious arrhythmias such as ventricular fibrillation/tachycardia. The ECG signal quality is in the majority of cases of sufficient quality for a cardiologist to make an assessment.

Using 3G, or any other Internet connection available on the mobile phone, the data collected is transmitted to the Health Care data server where it becomes available for viewing and further analysis by qualified specialists. The broad range of features show the way in patient centred healthcare.

Does the portable lung becomes part of the mHealth-toolbox?

I’m not sure if there are any digital parts.  It’s more like a prosthetic. If so, wouldn’t I write about it? This invention of professor Bill Johns is amazing anough:worlds first portable lung.

A portable lung could help those with breathing problems lead a normal life. Researchers at the Swansea University in the United Kingdom say their device, which oxygenates blood outside the body before it goes through the lungs, could be an alternative to transplants. The scientists work together with Haemair Ltd in Wales and say it could take many years before the device, the size of a spectacles case, is available.

The device mimics the function of a lung by getting oxygen into and carbon dioxide out of the blood stream. The development is a three phase project. An external device will be deployed first. It is easily reversible and major parts are available for maintenance. The easy reversibility is important in treating emergency and acute cases for which the device might be needed for no more than hours or weeks. The second phase is the clinical procedure to “plumb” the device into the blood circulation system. It’s more complex and maintenance is more difficult. However, the engineering is simpler. The only significant external item required is a small air pump, or fan. This device is more suited to patients who will need it for months, for example, as a bridge to transplant. It should enable patients to leave hospital and continue treatment at home. The final variant, a prosthetic lung, serves as an alternative to a lung transplant. It cannot be deployed until we have extensive favourable experience with the reversible devices. However, it offers hope to those currently excluded from transplant waiting lists.

According to the British Lung Foundation, there are more than 40 conditions which affect the lungs and airways and impact on a person’s ability to breathe. They include lung cancer, tuberculosis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cystic fibrosis, sleep apnoea, avian flu, bronchiolitis and many others. Research suggests that one person in every seven is affected by lung disease. Professor Bill Johns: “It is important that we make something that will help people, who instead of being confined to a wheelchair with an oxygen bottle, can actually walk around and do things for themselves”.

RFID tags for medicine control at home.

RFID tracking is here. Want to know which medicine, when or what dosis to take? Just start with a home RFID kit for just $50.

Attach the RFID tags to things around your home or office, install the software and you’re good to go. You can use your own programming skills to make your computer do various things when various RFID tags are presented to your reader, or use an application website to link your RFID tags to just about anything on the web.

There are now two products on the market with the same kind of product and service. Mir:ror is an Internet of Things app from the company Violet. As the name suggests, it is literally a mirror – but an Internet-connected one which detects the objects you show it, triggering applications and multimedia content on your computer. It works via RFID stamps. These are colorful adhesive stamps that contain a relay chip. When the user waves a stamped object over the mir:ror, a pre-programmed action occurs. This can also mean reading a message aloud to you.

Second is Touchatag an internet startup from Alcatel-Lucent.  With a Touchatag starter kit and some client software, you can also program your own RFID tags so that they can do anything you want them to do. They can launch an application, deliver you to a URL, and much more. What’s great about Toucha’s tags is that you don’t need a specialized RFID reader in order to scan them. They’re can also be read with a barcodescanner in any enabled mobile phone.

The usage for medicinecontrol are specialy interesting. Reading the stamp you put on the medicinebottle can not only inform the patient with information about his useage, but can also sent data to a medical centre.

The Mir:ror also works with the company’s other internet-connected object: the Nabaztag, a cute robot rabbit that can deliver anything from ambient information through lights and sounds to verbal information.

Mobile energymonitoring usefull in homecare.

Energy and care, an interesting couple. Suppose you know how much energy is used in a home on an average basis. Just at once it’s going up. Is this a signal we can use? Energy monitoring is not just profitable or good for the environment, it tells us about the behaviour in the house. The refrigeratordoor is left open, the electric heater is making overhours, the TV-set never stops. Time to have a look.

Peter Troast, founder of Energy Circle, a company that sells energy-saving products, has created a new energy-monitoring system that sends his home’s energy usage stats to Twitter and on to your mobile. Inspired by the open source power monitoring kit from Tweet-a-Watt, Troast’s system also sends his home’s energy data to the web, but it’s not in the form of once-a-day tweets like Tweet-a-Watt provides. Instead, his system uses a monitoring device called TED (The Energy Dectective) to create charts and then tweeted to see.

The real-time data can be viewed online. Google’s Visualization API is able to create a graph with the data from TED energy-monitoring device. As there are spikes and dips in the graph, a family member annotates those occurrences and those notes are automatically tweeted to a special Twitter account at Twitter.com/EnergyCirclekw.

When you are a “do-it-yourself” developers and hold them over until Google gets their PowerMeter rolling, you need:

• TED (The Energy Detective)
• ASUS WL 500G Deluxe wireless router
• OPEN Wrt operating System
• Google Visualization API

Methode:

1. You’ll need a wireless router that has a USB Port and is capable of running an OPEN Wrt operating system. The Troasts went with the ASUS WL 500G Deluxe.
2. Replace the router’s existing operating system with the OPEN Wrt operating system (Here’s how.)
3. A customized script (customized software) has to then be put into the OPEN Wrt operating system. OK, so this is the hard part, Troast says the developers will post the script online at the EnergyCircle blog in a couple of days if there’s interest.
4. Plug the TED into the wireless router using TED’s USB port.
5. Write the ability to add an annotation to the data into the web site database so that you can annotate the data in the database.
6. Write the data display page using the Google visualization API, which enables you to take the data and annotations and make a chart like the one that you see on the EnergyCircle site. (Specifically, they used the Annotated Time Line feature in Google’s visualization API).

A private cloud for your mHealth-system

“Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet” says Wikipedia. Next they tell us that “users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them”. But is that so? Plug and play and you can start your own cloud.

For the infrastucture and storage we take a look at the PogoPlug. References tell it’s a breeze to set up, quick and easy. Essentially you plug the included LAN Cable into your router and into the PogoPlug. Then you plug it into either a wall socket or a power strip. After that you plug in the USB drive you want to use. Go to the website enter your email address and set up a password. That’s it. You can now easily share and access your files from anywhere in the world.

Mobile connectivity is foreseen. You can access all your media from an iPhone, and even send new pictures from your iPhone straight to your home, with a single click. The streaming of video seems pretty quick over WiFi and more than serviceable over 3G.

Mobile phones like the iPhone are more and more like a “mini” computer in our pocket. However, the nature of the phones’ hardware still limits them when it comes to sheer processing power and battery life. That’s why Intel Research Berkeley scientists Byung-Gon Chun and Petros Maniatis have come up with CloneCloud, a new service that uses cloud computing to provide extra processing power for mobile phones.

The CloneCloud service uses a smart phone’s high-speed internet connection to communicate with a copy of itself (a clone) that lives on remote servers in the cloud. When the phone needs to perform any processor-intensive task, it can offload the work to the service after first calculating factors like amount of time and battery life required to move the data to the cloud. This can dramatically improve the phone’s capabilities. For example a test with facial recognition on photos required 100 seconds to run on a mobile, but once offloaded to another computer, the same task took just one second.

At present, CloneCloud exists as a prototype that runs on Google’s Android mobile OS. It will be demonstrated for the first time publicly at the HotOS XII conference in Switzerland later this month. Challenges like network latency, bandwidth limitations, phone’s data connection speed, moving through different coverage areas and stumbling into a “dead” zone, are still to meet. In the meantime, you can read up on the service’s details in the PDF “Augmented Smartphone Applications Through Clone Cloud Execution.”