MHealth and thought control.

First came the joystick. Then came the motion-sensing Wii remote. What´s next? Sensors and mobiles are opening up a new world: thought control.

Co-founded by Allan Snyder, a neuroscientist and former University of Cambridge research fellow, Emotiv says its EPOC headset features 16 sensors that push against the player’s scalp to measure electrical activity in the brain – a process known as electro-encephalography. In theory, this allows the player to spin, push, pull, and lift objects on a computer monitor, simply by thinking. “There will be a convergence of gesture-based technology and the brain as a new interface – the Holy Grail is the mind” says Snyder.

Last month the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), an arm of the US Defence Department, said it had awarded a $6.7 million contract to Northrop Grumman to develop “brainwave binoculars”. The binoculars use scalp-mounted sensors to detect objects the user might have seen but not noticed – in other words, the computer is used as a kind of brain-aid, giving the user superhuman vision.

Explaining the technology, Dr Robert Shin, an assistant professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said: “There is a level where the brain can identify things before it ever makes it to the conscious level. Your brain says, ‘it may be something’, but it might not realize that it is something that should rise to the conscious level.”

Another defence contractor, Honeywell, has been working on a similar technology known as “augmented cognition” to help intelligence analysts to operate more effectively. Based on the same principle as the binoculars, it has been shown to make analysts work up to seven times faster. It can also detect when they are getting tired. In other tests, soldiers have been kitted out with headsets that detect “brain overload”, allowing commanders to know if they can process new information under the extreme pressures of the battlefield.

Basic components for building mHealth devices.

One step beyond the platform is adding other components. What do you create when your motto is “Computing stuff tied to the physical world?”  A tiny, fairly well featured kit with wireless capability. The JeeNode wireless communication platform.

It looks like a fun and cost effective way to get into experimenting with RF communication. By combining an Arduino-compatible processor (ATmega328) with a low-cost HopeRF radio module, Jean-Claude Wippler in a town called Houten, The Netherlands,  creates these building blocks and offering them for sale as a kit, or, since it is an open source hardware design, you can just download the PCB layout and roll your own. You can think of lots of applications (remote candle lighter, interactive cat toy:)) that aren’t worth a full xBee-based solution, where it would be handy to have a development board like this that I could just drop in and use.

Jee Labs also has a weblog with daily news about projects being worked on in the fascinating world of physical computing, wireless comm’s, sensors, lights, switches, motors, robots, WSN’s, Arduino’s, you name it.

Building a sensornetwork for mHealth purposes.

For a wireless sensor network you need a platform to start with. But what? Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software on running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).

The boards can be built by hand or purchased preassembled. The software can be downloaded for free. The hardware reference designs (CAD files) are available under an open-source license, you are free to adapt them to your needs.

Wireless Sensor Networks and mHealth basics 3.

Last theory on Wireless Sensor Networks coming up. What about the software, middleware and programming languages?

Software

Energy is the scarcest resource of WSN nodes, and it determines the lifetime of WSNs. WSNs are meant to be deployed in large numbers in various environments, including remote and hostile regions, with ad-hoc communications as key. For this reason, algorithms and protocols need to address the following issues:

• Lifetime maximization
• Robustness and fault tolerance
• Self-configuration

Middleware

There is considerable research effort currently invested in the design of middleware for WSN’s. In general approaches can be classified into distributed database, mobile agents, and event-based.

Programming languages

Programming the sensor nodes is difficult when compared with normal computer systems. The resource constrained nature of these nodes gives rise to new programming models although most nodes are currently programmed in C.

• c@t (Computation at a point in space (@) Time)
• DCL (Distributed Compositional Language)
• galsC
• LabVIEW
• nesC
• Protothreads
• SNACK
• SNAPpy (Python)
• SQTL
• Java Sun SPOT
• uSWN

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.

Wireless Sensor Networks and mHealth basics 1.

Building a Wireless Sensor Network is fine, but what are the unique characteristics of such a network:

• Limited power they can harvest or store
• Ability to withstand harsh environmental conditions
• Ability to cope with node failures
• Mobility of nodes
• Dynamic network topology
• Communication failures
• Heterogeneity of nodes
• Large scale of deployment
• Unattended operation
• Node capacity is scalable,only limited by bandwidth of gateway node.

Sensor nodes can be imagined as small computers, extremely basic in terms of their interfaces and their components. They usually consist of a processing unit with limited computational power and limited memory, sensors (including specific conditioning circuitry), a communication device (usually radio transceivers or alternatively optical), and a power source usually in the form of a battery. Other possible inclusions are energy harvesting modules, secondary ASICs, and possibly secondary communication devices (e.g. RS-232 or USB).

The base stations are one or more distinguished components of the WSN with much more computational, energy and communication resources. They act as a gateway between sensor nodes and the end user.

MHealth secures hygiene in hospitals.

Experts say nearly 2 million hospital-acquired infections occur each year, resulting in about 5,000 deaths and more than 90,000 illnesses in the US. Research shows that simple hand washing by medical staff could cut the number of infections in half. But what if your rushing to the next patient? There is now a wireless, credit-card-sized sensor that can detect whether health care workers have properly washed their hands upon entering a patient’s room.

The Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center was chosen as a study site because of its higher-than-average rate of hand hygiene compliance, nearly twice the national average. The sensor is worn like a name badge and is programmed to detect the presence of ethyl alcohol, the most common ingredient in hand cleansing solutions used in hospitals.
When a health care worker enters a patient’s room, a small, wall-mounted sensor sends a signal to the badge to check for the presence of alcohol. The worker places their hands near the badge to obtain a reading. Lights on the badge glow red if no alcohol is present, indicating the need to wash hands. A green light indicates alcohol is present.

“Health care workers don’t deliberately avoid washing their hands; they get distracted or are so busy moving from one thing to the next they don’t remember to do it,” said Mike Edmond, M.D., chief hospital epidemiologist. “Until now, the only way we’ve been able to track hand washing habits is through direct observation. This new system continuously monitors and records data and serves as a constant reminder.”

The hand hygiene program is part of an aggressive environmental and patient safety campaign at the VCU Medical Center called Safety First, Every Day. The goal of the campaign is to make the medical center the safest health care institution in the country with no events of preventable harm to patients, employees and visitors. The device was developed by BioVigil, LLC.

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.

Ultime integration of technology + communication + healthcare.

Intelligent medicine integrates in-body computing, sensor and communications technologies into medical existing devices and pharmaceutical products. What if my hip implant and my running shoes worked together? The Raisin system from Proteus Biomedical uses tiny computing devices inside pills to transmit data to doctors.

Raisin is a socalled “ingestible event marker”. It’s a tiny computing device put inside a pill. It reports when it has been swallowed, record information about the body’s response to the drug, and transmit the information. A high-frequency electrical current is send through the body’s tissue. Periodically a receiver, placed on the patient’s skin downloads the information and recorded on the mobile phone. The phone connects to the Internet. The patient can authorise access to the data for example doctors can track a treatment’s impact and a patient’s health in real time.

“This is the most personal computing that has ever been conceived,” says Andrew Thompson, Proteus CEO and co-founder. “It’s a secure system. The technology doesn’t rely on any kind of radio signal, instead using the conductivity of tissue to relay signals, which are thus confined within the body. The device eventually disintegrates and passes safely through the digestive system”.

The technology offers the potential to transform the way heart patients and those with infectious diseases or mental problems are managed. For drug therapy to be effective, patients have to adhere to a prescribed regime, taking required doses at appropriate intervals. But clinical studies show that more than 50% of heart patients do not receive guideline-recommended therapy, and of those who do, only 40% to 60% adhere to the regime.

The initial application of the Raisin system is for the treatment of patients with heart failure. The system senses and records the precise time a patient takes one or more microchip-enabled drugs, providing feedback on its bodily impact. The information is sent to caregivers and clinicians so that decisions can be made about any necessary adjustments. Proteus is also developing “intelligent leads,” or wires connected to defibrillators and pacemakers, which, when used in conjunction with Raisin, will allow doctors to make long-distance adjustments to both the device and a heart patient’s medications.

One of the significant challenges that have prevented widespread use of in-body computing to date is the disintegration of active electronics as they are exposed to bodily fluids. Proteus has developed so-called ChipSkin technology that eliminates this issue with an extremely thin and durable wrapper to protect the leads and preserve performance of the active electronics.