A mobile care system with alert mechanism.

Hypertension and arrhythmia are chronic diseases, which can be effectively prevented and controlled only if the physiological parameters of the patient are constantly monitored, along with the full support of the health education and professional medical care. In this paper, a role-based intelligent mobile care system with alert mechanism in chronic care environment is proposed and implemented. The roles in our system include patients, physicians, nurses, and healthcare providers. Each of the roles represents a person that uses a mobile device such as a mobile phone to communicate with the server setup in the care center such that he or she can go around without restrictions. For commercial mobile phones with Bluetooth communication capability attached to chronic patients, we have developed physiological signal recognition algorithms that were implemented and built-in in the mobile phone without affecting its original communication functions. It is thus possible to integrate several front-end mobile care devices with Bluetooth communication capability to extract patients' various physiological parameters [such as blood pressure, pulse, saturation of haemoglobin (SpO2), and electrocardiogram (ECG)], to monitor multiple physiological signals without space limit, and to upload important or abnormal physiological information to healthcare center for storage and analysis or transmit the information to physicians and healthcare providers for further processing. Thus, the physiological signal extraction devices only have to deal with signal extraction and wireless transmission. Since they do not have to do signal processing, their form factor can be further reduced to reach the goal of microminiaturization and power saving. An alert management mechanism has been included in back-end healthcare center to initiate various strategies for automatic emergency alerts after receiving emergency messages or after automatically recognizing emergency messages. Within the time intervals in system setting, according to the medical history of a specific patient, our prototype system can inform various healthcare providers in sequence to provide healthcare service with their reply to ensure the accuracy of alert information and the completeness of early warning notification to further improve the healthcare quality. In the end, with the testing results and performance evaluation of our implemented system prototype, we conclude that it is possible to set up a complete intelligent healt care chain with mobile monitoring and healthcare service via the assistance of our system.     

A RESTful image gateway for multiple medical image repositories

Mobile technologies are increasingly important components in telemedicine systems and are becoming powerful decision support tools. Universal access to data may already be achieved by resorting to the latest generation of tablet devices and smartphones. However, the protocols employed for communicating with image repositories are not suited to exchange data with mobile devices. In this paper, we present an extensible approach to solving the problem of querying and delivering data in a format that is suitable for the bandwidth and graphic capacities of mobile devices. We describe a three-tiered component-based gateway that acts as an intermediary between medical applications and a number of Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). The interface with the gateway is accomplished using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests following a Representational State Transfer (REST) methodology, which relieves developers from dealing with complex medical imaging protocols and allows the processing of data on the server side.     

A Fog Assisted Cyber-Physical Framework for Identifying and Preventing Coronary Heart Disease

Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) is the most common cardiovascular disease which has the highest mortality rate in developing countries. To predict and prevent the risk of CHD in its early stages from remote sites, real time monitoring and analysis of an individual’s health statistics is required. Cloud based cyber-physical systems facilitate the alliance of devices in the physical world i.e. cameras, sensors and Geographical Positioning System devices with cyber world to generate the required information. Then it uses cyber world to analyze and share medical information along with localization data with healthcare service providers. Moreover, with the ability to transmit intensive information anytime and anywhere, this technological revolution has raised the level of effective healthcare deliverance. With these aspects, cloud based cyber-physical localization system is proposed to identify the risk level of CHD using adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system at an early stage. The users who are in the middle or high risk category will be monitored continuously to keep track of their electrocardiogram (ECG) readings. In case of any abnormality in ECG readings, an alert will be immediately sent to the user’s mobile phone as well as to the healthcare service providers or professionals to take immediate or necessary action on time for patient’s wellness. It also provides preventive measures and medication according to the risk category of the user. The experimental results reveal that the proposed system efficiently and effectively classifies the risk of CHD as well as utilizes minimum response time in generation of alerts on the basis of ECG readings.     

A secure mobile healthcare system using trust-based multicast scheme

Due to the introduction of telecommunication technologies in telemedicine services, the expeditious development of wireless and mobile networks has stimulated wide applications of mobile electronic healthcare systems. However, security is an essential system requirement since many patients have privacy concerns when it comes to releasing their personal information over the open wireless channels. For this reason, this study discusses the characteristics and security issues with wireless and pervasive data communications for a ubiquitous and mobile healthcare system which consists of a number of mobile devices and sensors attached to a patient. These devices form a mobile ad hoc sensor network and collect data that are sent to a hospital or healthcare center for monitoring. Subsequently, this paper discusses the innovation and design of a novel trust evaluation model. We then propose a secure multicast strategy that employs trust in order to evaluate the behavior of each node, so that only trustworthy nodes are allowed to participate in communications, while the misbehavior of malicious nodes is effectively prevented. We analyze the security properties of our multicast scheme and evaluate its performance based on simulation experiments. Our experimental results demonstrate that our scheme not only achieves the necessary data transmission in mobile environments, but also provides more security with reasonably little additional overhead.     

Cross-layer based congestion detection and routing protocol using fuzzy logic for MANET

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) is made up of mobile devices which form an infrastructure-less network. In MANET, the devices can change its location and configure itself at any time. Hence, there is a possibility for the network to be prone to abnormal network events due to certain factors like error in the links, overflow in the buffers, layers, and so forth. So, in this paper, a cross-layer based congestion detection and routing protocol is proposed using Fuzzy logic. In this protocol, whenever a network event occurs, the kind of event occurring is recognized in order to handle it accordingly. Next, the alternate routes for data transmission are determined by applying the concept of fuzzy logic on some of the critical factors. Based on the fuzzy inference rules, appropriate routes are selected and data messages are transmitted successfully.     

An efficient approach to reduce alerts generated by multiple IDS products

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) often trigger a huge number of unnecessary alerts. Managing the overwhelming number of alerts, especially from multiple IDS products, is a concern to every security analyst. Analyzing and evaluating these alerts is a difficult task that frustrates the effort of analysts. In fact, true alerts are usually buried under heaps of false alerts. We have identified several research gaps in the existing alert management approaches that need to be addressed, especially when handling alerts from different IDS products. In this work, we present an efficient alert management approach that reduces the unnecessary alerts produced by different IDS products using two main modules: an enhanced alert verification module that validates alerts with vulnerability assessment data; and an enhanced alert aggregator module that reduces redundant alerts and presents them in the form of meta alerts. Finally, we have carried out experiments in our test bed and recorded impressive results in terms of high accuracy and low false positive rate for multiple IDS products. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Integrating service discovery with routing and session management for ad-hoc networks

In this paper, we propose GSR: a new routing and session management protocol for ad-hoc networks as an integral part of a service discovery infrastructure. Traditional approaches place routing at a layer below service discovery. While this distinction is appropriate for wired networked services, we argue that in ad-hoc networks this layering is not as meaningful and show that integrating routing with discovery infrastructure increases system efficiency. Central to our protocol is the idea of reusing the path created by the combination of a service discovery request and a service advertisement for data transmission. This precludes the need to use separate routing and discovery protocols. GSR also combines transport layer features and provides end-to-end session management that detects disconnections, link and node failures and enables service-centric session redirection to handle failures. This enables GSR to accommodate service-centric routing apart from the traditional node-centric routing. We compare GSR with AODV in terms of packet delivery ratio, response time and average number of hops traveled by service requests as well as data. GSR achieves better packet delivery ratio with a minor increase of the average packet delivery delay.     

A Semantically Enriched Clinical Guideline Model Enabling Deployment in Heterogeneous Healthcare Environments

Clinical guidelines are developed to assist healthcare practitioners to make decisions on patient's medical problems, and as such they communicate with external applications to retrieve patient data to initiate medical actions through clinical workflows, and transmit information to alert/reminder systems. The interoperability problems in the healthcare information technology domain prevent wider deployment of clinical guidelines because each deployment requires a tedious custom adaptation phase. In this paper, we provide machine-processable mechanisms that express the semantics of clinical guideline interfaces so that automated processes can be used to access the clinical resources for guideline deployment and execution. To be able to deploy the semantically extended guidelines to healthcare settings semiautomatically, the underlying application's semantics must also be available. We describe how this can be achieved based on two prominent implementation technologies in use in the eHealth domain: integrating healthcare enterprise cross-enterprise document sharing integration profile for discovering and exchanging electronic healthcare records and Web service technology for interacting with the clinical workflows and wireless medical sensor devices. The system described in this paper is realized within the scope of the SAPHIRE Project.      

Online multicast routing with bandwidth guarantees: a new approach using multicast network flow

We present a new algorithm for online routing of bandwidth-guaranteed multicasts where routing requests arrive one by one without any prior knowledge of future requests. A multicast routing request consists of a source, a set of receivers, and a bandwidth requirement. Two multicast applications of interest are routing of point-to-multipoint label-switched paths in multiprotocol label switched (MPLS) networks, and the provision of bandwidth-guaranteed virtual private network (VPN) services under the "hose" service model. Without prior knowledge of multicast requests, offline multicast routing algorithms cannot be used. Online algorithms are needed to handle requests arriving one by one and to satisfy as many potential future demands as possible. Our new online algorithm is based on the idea that a newly routed multicast must follow a route that does not interfere too much with network paths that may be critical to satisfy future demands. We develop a multicast tree selection heuristic based on the idea of deferred loading of certain critical links. The algorithm identifies them as links that, if heavily loaded, would make it impossible to satisfy future demands between certain ingress-egress pairs. The algorithm uses link-state information and some auxiliary capacity information for multicast tree selection and is amenable to distributed implementation. Unlike previous algorithms, our algorithm exploits any available knowledge of the network ingress-egress points of potential future demands, even though the demands themselves are unknown. It performs very well.     

Multilevel Location Trigger in Distributed Mobile Environments for Location‐Based Services

In location‐based services, most trigger technologies have been implemented on the server side by periodically requesting the locations of mobile phones from mobile network servers. However, bottlenecks and communication interruptions occur when the servers are overloaded by trigger requests. In this letter, we propose a new multilevel location trigger specification which distributes the event detecting role to mobile phones and redesigns the location triggering into a multilevel step. Our suggested location trigger specification can reduce bottlenecks caused by triggers in a mobile core network and reduce power consumption caused by embedded GPS devices in mobile phones.     

A venues‐aware message routing scheme for delay‐tolerant networks

With their proliferation and increasing capabilities, mobile devices with local wireless interfaces can be organized into delay‐tolerant networks (DTNs) that exploit communication opportunities arising out of the movement of their users. As the mobile devices are usually carried by people, these DTNs can also be viewed as social networks. Unfortunately, most existing routing algorithms for DTNs rely on relatively simple mobility models that rarely consider these social network characteristics, and therefore, the mobility models in these algorithms cannot accurately describe users’ real mobility traces. In this paper, we propose two predict and spread (PreS) message routing algorithms for DTNs. We employ an adapted Markov chain to model a node's mobility pattern and capture its social characteristics. A comparison with state‐of‐the‐art algorithms demonstrates that PreS can yield better performance in terms of delivery ratio and delivery latency, and it can provide a comparable performance with the epidemic routing algorithm with lower resource consumption. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Multi-link Mechanism for Heterogeneous Radio Networks

Nowadays, smart mobile devices drive the mobile traffic growth rapidly. Most smart mobile devices are equipped with multiple radio network interfaces, such as High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), Long Term Evolution (LTE), and Wi-Fi. Therefore, integration of multiple networks is a viable solution to fulfill traffic offloading and the Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirement of data usage for mobile users. In this paper, we propose a multi-link mechanism to handle the radio network selection and switching between LTE and Wi-Fi networks. A Multi-Link Adaptor (MLA) and a Multi-Connection Manager (MCM) are proposed for the User Equipment (UE) and the core network, respectively, to handle the multi-link mechanism. The applications executed in the UEs do not need to be modified under the proposed approach. The MLA maintains a QoS class table and a routing table for the network selection procedure and uses the GPRS Tunneling Protocol-Control plane (GTP-C) control messages to execute network switching. In the future, we will measure the throughput of the multi-link network and the switch delay between the heterogeneous radio networks.     

URL formalization: an efficient technique to speedup content-aware switching

We devise a data structure termed URL table to hold content-related information for making content-aware routing decisions. We also propose a novel idea termed "URL formalization", which provide a scalable solution to speedup the content-aware request routing. The performance result shows that our approaches can intelligently route Web requests at very high speed.     

Querying sensor networks using ad hoc mobile devices: A two-layer networking approach

An interplay between mobile devices and static sensor nodes is envisioned in the near future. This will enable a heterogeneous design space that can offset the stringent resource and power constraints encountered in traditional static sensor networks by taking advantage of the more powerful mobile devices. We present a systematic framework for end-to-end query processing, using a two-layer architecture that consists of mobile devices at the upper layer and static sensor nodes at the bottom layer. The framework employs a “PULL” query model that contains staged operations including query generation, query routing, query injection, and query result routing. Each of these stages of query processing is discussed with an emphasis on techniques for energy-efficient query injection and query result routing with location-ignorant sensor nodes. The techniques leverage the mobility and transmission flexibility of mobile objects at the upper layer. Numeric and simulation results are provided to support the proposed methods.     

RPSF: A Routing Protocol with Selective Forwarding for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Many existing reactive routing algorithms for mobile ad-hoc networks use a simple broadcasting mechanism for route discovery which can lead to a high redundancy of route-request messages, contention, and collision. Position-based routing algorithms address this problem but require every node to know the position and velocity of every other node at some point in time so that route requests can be propagated towards the destination without flooding the entire network. In a general ad-hoc network, each node maintaining the position information of every other node is expensive or impossible. In this paper, we propose a routing algorithm that addresses these drawbacks. Our algorithm, based on one-hop neighborhood information, allows each node to select a subset of its neighbors to forward route requests. This algorithm greatly reduces the number of route-request packets transmitted in the route-discovery process. We compare the performance of our algorithm with the well known Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing algorithm. On average, our algorithm needs less than 12.6% of the routing-control packets needed by AODV. Simulation results also show that our algorithm has a higher packet-delivery ratio and lower average end-to-end delay than AODV.     

Integrating a mobile health applications for self-management to enhance Telecare system

A dramatic global increase in the pervasiveness of chronic illness has coincided with a reduction in the availability of healthcare resources, coupled with increased costs for care, forcing a fundamental reevaluation of care processes. These trends have driven interest in the use of advanced healthcare information systems and telematics applications to improve care availability while reducing overall costs, but such measures require taking an integrated approach to a range of interrelated social, economic, political and cultural impacts and challenges. Telecare technologies allow hospitals to continuously monitor biomedical indicators, while providing patients with online services such as clinical appointment scheduling, medical consulting, remote alerts, etc. Telecare has the potential to transform the healthcare industry by reducing costs, increasing quality, and enhancing patient satisfaction. The development of a real-time monitoring healthcare service model through the integration of information and communications technologies (ICT) has emerged as a research priority. This study explores the design, value creation, development and evaluation of Telecare systems and mobile health applications for autonomous health management to ensure appropriate home-based health monitoring and treatment while improving care performance. A well-defined methodology is needed to develop artifacts due to increasing disease complexity. This study develops an Android-based self-management application based on design science research methodology. The App assists users in collecting and monitoring indicators to prompt appropriate care services. This study uses individual home self-care as the basic Telecare unit to design a service model integrating six kinds of healthcare services. Usability testing is conducted to reflect five constructs: system usefulness, ease of learning, information quality, interface quality, and overall satisfaction. Experimental results support previous research findings regarding the Chronic Care Model and enhance the effectiveness of mobile-based services. Our work provides a useful reference to researchers and practitioners interested in understanding how hospitals can better facilitate more effective mobile-based technology adoption in today’s e-health environment.     

Location-Aware Mobile Intrusion Detection with Enhanced Privacy in a 5G Context

The paper proposes a location-aware mobile Intrusion Prevention System (mIPS) architecture with enhanced privacy that is integrated in Managed Security Service (MSS). The solution is envisaged in a future fifth generation telecommunications (5G) context with increased but varying bandwidth, a virtualised execution environment and infrastructure that allows threads, processes, virtual machines and storage to be migrated to cloud computing services on demand, to dynamically scale performance and save power. 5G mobile devices will be attractive targets for malicious software, and this threat will in some cases change with location. Mobile devices will store more sensitive information and will also be used to a larger extent for sensitive transactions than they typically do today. In addition, a distributed execution environment in itself gives raise to some new security challenges. In order to handle these security challenges, we have proposed the location-aware mIPS architecture, which benefits from a distributed execution environment where processor intensive services can be outsourced to Cloud hosting providers. The mIPS supports querying location threat profiles in a privacy-preserving way, and ensures that mIPS alerts sent to the the first-line MSS are anonymised. We finally perform an analysis of potential strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach.     

Minimisation de la consommation d’Énergie dans les réseaux ad hoc

An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless devices forming a temporary network independently of any administration or fixed infrastructure. The main benefits of this new generation of mobile networks are flexibility and their low cost. Wireless devices have maximum utility when they can be used “anywhere at anytime “. However, one of the greatest limitations to that goal is the finite power supplies. Since batteries provide limited power, a general constraint of wireless communication is the short continuous operation time of mobile terminals. This constraint is more important for the ad hoc networks, since every terminal has to perform the functions of a router. Therefore, energy consumption should be a crucial issue while designing new communication protocols and particularly ad hoc routing protocols. We propose, in this paper, some extensions to the most important on-demand routing algorithm,Aodv (Ad hoc On demand Distance Vector). The discovery mechanism in these extensions uses energy as a routing metric. These algorithms improve the network survivability by maintaining the network connectivity, which is the strong requirement for a high-quality communication. They carry out this objective with low message overhead for computing routes and without affecting the other network protocol layers.     

Integration of Internet and telecommunications: an architecture forhybrid services

We propose an architecture for hybrid services, i.e., services that span many network technologies, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN), cellular networks, and networks based on IP. These services will play an important role in the future because they leverage on the existing infrastructures rather than requiring new and sophisticated mechanisms to be deployed. We explore a few issues related to hybrid services and propose a platform as well as a set of components to facilitate their creation and deployment. The existing infrastructure is only required to generate specific events when requests for hybrid services are detected. We present the design of a service layer, based on Java, that handles the treatment of these special requests. Our service layer is provided with a set of generic components realized according to the JavaBeans model. We illustrate the strength of our architecture by discussing two hybrid-service examples: a calendar service and a call forwarding service     

SparkMed: a framework for dynamic integration of multimedia medical data into distributed m-Health systems

With the advent of 4G and other long-term evolution (LTE) wireless networks, the traditional boundaries of patient record propagation are diminishing as networking technologies extend the reach of hospital infrastructure and provide on-demand mobile access to medical multimedia data. However, due to legacy and proprietary software, storage and decommissioning costs, and the price of centralization and redevelopment, it remains complex, expensive, and often unfeasible for hospitals to deploy their infrastructure for online and mobile use. This paper proposes the SparkMed data integration framework for mobile healthcare (m-Health), which significantly benefits from the enhanced network capabilities of LTE wireless technologies, by enabling a wide range of heterogeneous medical software and database systems (such as the picture archiving and communication systems, hospital information system, and reporting systems) to be dynamically integrated into a cloud-like peer-to-peer multimedia data store. Our framework allows medical data applications to share data with mobile hosts over a wireless network (such as WiFi and 3G), by binding to existing software systems and deploying them as m-Health applications. SparkMed integrates techniques from multimedia streaming, rich Internet applications (RIA), and remote procedure call (RPC) frameworks to construct a Self-managing, Pervasive Automated netwoRK for Medical Enterprise Data (SparkMed). Further, it is resilient to failure, and able to use mobile and handheld devices to maintain its network, even in the absence of dedicated server devices. We have developed a prototype of the SparkMed framework for evaluation on a radiological workflow simulation, which uses SparkMed to deploy a radiological image viewer as an m-Health application for telemedical use by radiologists and stakeholders. We have evaluated our prototype using ten devices over WiFi and 3G, verifying that our framework meets its two main objectives: 1) interactive delivery of medical multimedia data to mobile devices; and 2) attaching to non-networked medical software processes without significantly impacting their performance. Consistent response times of under 500 ms and graphical frame rates of over 5 frames per second were observed under intended usage conditions. Further, overhead measurements displayed linear scalability and low resource requirements.