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Wireless networks and hand-held devices are permanently evolving and becoming a more effective alternative to actual network technologies and applications that are used by the health service providers. We envision a Hospital Area Network (HAN) that is formed mainly using WLAN and Zigbee. A Zigbee sensor network of wearable health monitoring devices, medical equipments and PDA’s is formed enabling the hospital staff to be connected to their critical systems independent of their location in the medical facility. However, to take advantage of the high mobility enabled by the wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the HAN application, a series of problems have to be solved, like: choosing a good abstraction level to work with the WSN (e.g. appropriate middleware), design software that increases interoperability between heterogeneous medical devices, design hardware that are energy efficient and miniaturized, find techniques and algorithms that are appropriate for an increasing complexity, dynamic and ad-hoc behavior of the network. In this paper, we will tackle some of these problems and refer to hardware and software aspects. On the hardware side, the low power Zigbee-ready motes are suggested as the hardware platform for on the body medical sensor nodes and medical devices. On the software side, the OSA+ II middleware that scales down to the miniaturized medical sensor nodes and that allows a good interoperability between them is explained. Then, we will show how organic computing can be used in HAN. Organic computing consists of techniques and principles used in nature, like: self-organization that can be applied for building an HAN that is easy to deploy and flexible to adapt for hospital specific situations.

To be good in quality, anticancer drug should be made in stable environment. To overcome the limitation of existing equipment that only monitor fragmentarily, we used sensor networks for continuous monitoring and RFID for substance management. Therefore, the dispensary’s monitoring and andticancer drug management system in hospital may maintaining the dispensary’s circumstance in fixed temperature and humidity, and confirm the right substance to the right patient. We developed the combined temperature/humidity monitoring and substance management system using ubiquitous sensor network and RFID, and demonstrated its clinical usability.

Seamless exchange of information and communication between disparate and physically distributed systems or business applications is needed and desired by most organizations today. Healthcare is one of those most important application areas where such technology solutions are required. Physical Fitness Testing Systems (HIMS) are distributed at different locations. HIMS measures the individual’s physiological signals during rest and exercise, evaluates physical fitness and prescribes personalized exercise in terms of exercise intensity, duration and frequency by using automatic exercise prescription algorithm. Many HIMS deployed in various locations of a hospital need to communicate with the Hospital Information Systems (HIS) in order to make test reservations for patients and also for receiving test results and exercise prescriptions. This paper proposes a Communication Gateway between HIMS and HIS systems, which can ensure easily accessible, platform independent, reliable and timely exchange of information between them. The gateway is provided through a central web service hosted on a web site. When any HIS client accesses the site, it first gets authenticated through the central web service hosted there. It can then make reservation for its patients on the site. The list is stored in the central database and after being composed as an XML string by the service working on the site; it is sent to a remote service that is running on individual HIMS system. The system service then parses and stores the reservation lists in its database. Later when a client wants to retrieve patients test results and exercise prescription, it can access them from the site. The service working on the site communicates with the remote system service, gets the required information as XML string, parses and stores the information in central database and then displays according to the user’s preference, thus providing clients ease of access to their required information.

The present study proposes a portable patient monitoring system that combines PDA and wireless communication technology to obtain biological signals from subjects without any constraints. It has two types of transmission mode, which are total signal transmission mode and HR (heart rate)/SC (step count) transmission mode. The developed system uses Zigbee wireless PAN, which can be operated in low-power mode. It is composed of a receiver and a transmitter. The transmitter has three-axial acceleration sensor, ECG amplifier and Zigbee communication controller. In total signal transmission mode, it can send data 60 packets per second whose transmission speed corresponds to 300 ECG samples and 60 acceleration samples. In HR/SC transmission mode, it can calculate heart rate from ECG data with 216 samples per second and step count from acceleration data and send a packet every cardiac cycle. The receiver forwards the received data to PDA, where the data can be stored and displayed. The developed equipment showed the possibility of real-time monitoring of the elderly or the disabled in their daily life and is expected to contribute to the saving of medical expenses.

Wearable real-time health monitoring technology has been developed for remote diagnosis and health check during daily life. The present study proposes two algorithms to detect respiratory rate from ECG signal. One gets respiratory rate by measuring the number of ECG samples in R-R interval and its advantage lies in its simplicity. The other detects the rate by measuring the size of R wave in QRS signal. This algorithm can detect the rate more robustly but it is complicated and requires the ECG signal base line to be stabilized. The preliminary study in laboratory environment showed that the precision of these algorithms was over 97%.

Self management of chronic asthma is of great importance, since the disease could lead the patient into an emergent situation. In the present study, we describe design and implementation of a personal digital assistant(PDA) based asthma management system for personal application including symptom and medication to prevent from the potential exacerbation of the disease. The software program was written by the Visual C++ tool in the mobile computing environment and Object Store was applied for data management. User friendly GUI environment was provided for the patient to input his/her daily condition and self treatment such as medication for successful management. The input screen design substituted for keyboard input to a mouse in order to easy to select an item and minimize the keyboard input. The implementation results of this system., Real-time data collection and process were possible and be able to have been carried effectively out a continuous symptom, a medication of asthma patients, risk management.

The control of left ventricular assist device (LVAD) has been based on pressures of left ventricle (LV), aorta (AO) and pulmonary artery (PA) and flows in AO and PA. These parameters are one-dimensional and suitable for control of LVAD because they are numerical and quantitative. However, evaluation of the cardiac function by echocardiography is very useful in clinical settings because the cardiac function changes rapidly and dramatically. Transesophageal echocardiography is very useful for the assessment of cardiac function of the patients with LVAD implantation because it can detect and visualize what is happening in the heart immediately and directly.

Several robotic surgical systems have been developed for minimally-invasive surgery including commercialized products such as da Vinci and ZEUS. We have developed a minimally-invasive surgical system, which had performed remote surgery experiments for several times including a transnational remote surgery. The developed system consists of an operation site, a surgery site, and a communication link. The operation site is where the operator exists. The surgery site is where the patient, the slave manipulator and assistants exist. These two sites can be connected by various network lines (e.g. ISDN, LAN and ATM) for sending/receiving information of visual information, auditory information, and control signal for the manipulators. In this paper, the overview of the developed system and its remote surgery experiments are described.

ICRP has published several documents dealing with medical exposures; one of them addresses digital radiology. All these documents are expected to help medical practitioners and medical physicists to improve radiation safety. It is also expected that regulators, administrators and industry take into consideration the content of these publications. ICRP-93 (Managing patient dose in digital radiology, 2004) emphasizes that diagnostic information provided by digital detectors can be equal or superior to conventional film-screen systems, with comparable patient doses. With digital systems, an overexposure can occur without an adverse impact on image quality. A tendency to increase doses can occur. The ICRP publication includes several formal recommendations dealing with: training aspects; review of diagnostic reference levels (DRL); patient dose audits; availability of the original image data to the user; optimization when new digital systems or new postprocessing software are introduced; procedures for quality control; justification criteria, and role of the industry. It is expected that the ICRP report will help to profit from the benefits of this important technological advance in medical imaging with the best management of radiation doses to the patients. It should also promote training actions before the digital techniques are introduced in radiology departments and encourage the industry to offer enough technical and dosimetric information to radiologists, radiographers and medical physicists to help in image optimization. Some experimental results of the impact of the ICRP recommendations on this topic, using a database with 204,000 dose values for projection radiography, are presented. Median values of patient entrance doses increased 40% to 110% after computed radiography implementation, compared to earlier values with screen-film. Increases were corrected after focused training actions and on line patient dose audits. At present, doses have been substantially reduced; they range between 13% and 38% of the European DRL established for screen-film radiography.