A power and data front-end IC for biomedical monitoring systems

To enable the evolution towards electronically assisted healthcare, future medical implants require sensors and processing circuitry to inform patient and doctor on the rehabilitation status. An important branch of systems are those where implant strain is monitored through strain gauges. Since batteries inside the human body are avoided as much as possible, a transcutaneous power link is used to wirelessly power the implant. The same RF link provides an elegant way of establishing bi-directional data communication between the external base station and the medical device. This paper describes a front-end IC that manages both power reception and bi-directional data communication. It has a clock generation circuit on board to drive additional digital processing circuits. A new architecture that uses a current driven data demodulation principle is introduced. It is able to detect an AM signal with modulation depth of a mere 4%, which is better than recent similar systems in the field. The IC is fabricated in a solid 0.35 μm HVCMOS technology and consumes only 0.56 mA.     

e-Health in Australia: A synthesis of thirty years of e-Health initiatives

This paper provides an overview of the history of e-Health initiatives in Australia. It highlights the importance of contextual factors in their evolution and the way in which certain initiatives have been managed. The first section outlines the development of e-Health systems in Australia from their inception to the present day. Then, Australia’s e-Health system is evaluated in relation to comparable countries using social mechanism theory. This provides a process-based approach for understanding the relationship between process, context and outcomes in the evaluation of e-Health initiatives in Australia and in comparable countries.     

An e-health platform for the elderly population: The butler system

The Butler system is an e-health platform designed to improve the elderly population’s quality of life. The Butler system has three applications diagnostic, therapeutic and playful. The objective of this work is to present the influence of the use of the platform on elderly users’ mood states and the degree of acceptance. These measures were assessed through visual analogical scales before and after the platform use, with the outcome measures MANOVAS analyses were performed. Seventeen users (from 58 to 79 years old) completed four sessions with the system; they could choose which technological resources they used in each session. The results showed that after using the system, the participants’ insensitive emotions increased and their negative ones decreased. In addition, they obtained high levels of satisfaction, low levels of subjective difficulty and would recommend Butler to other users. Therefore, the results indicate that Butler might be an effective system for improving emotional states in elderly population.     

How shall I trust the faceless and the intangible? A literature review on the antecedents of online trust

Trust is generally assumed to be an important precondition for people’s adoption of electronic services. This paper provides an overview of the available research into the antecedents of trust in both commercial and non-commercial online transactions and services. A literature review was conducted covering empirical studies on people’s trust in and adoption of computer-mediated services. Results are described using a framework of three clusters of antecedents: customer/client-based, website-based, and company/organization-based antecedents. Results show that there are many possible antecedents of trust in electronic services. The majority of the research has been conducted in the context of e-commerce; only few studies are available in the domains of e-government and e-health. For many antecedents, some empirical support can be found, but the results are far from univocal. The research calls for more, and particularly more systematic, research attention for the antecedents of trust in electronic services. The review presented in this paper offers practitioners an overview of possibly relevant variables that may affect people’s trust in electronic services. It also gives a state-of-the-art overview of the empirical support for the relevance of these variables.     

Digital healthcare technology adoption by elderly people: A capability approach model

Digital technologies, such as online healthcare portals, enable elderly people to live independently at home for a longer period of time. Independent living, in this context, refers to the freedom elderly people have to live their lives in ways that they find important. Borrowing from the capability approach (CA) framework from Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, the core argument of this paper is that elderly people make decisions on whether to use digital healthcare technologies by considering how these technologies enhance their capabilities to live their lives in ways that are valuable to them. This paper develops a theoretical model of adoption of digital healthcare technologies that support independent living applying the CA framework. We follow a mixed-methods approach with a sequence of qualitative, quantitative, and qualitative methods. We find support for our theoretical model, specifically that the intention to use online healthcare portals depends on whether elderly people expect to enhance their capabilities for living independently by using them. Our study contributes to the information systems literature on adoption of digital healthcare technologies as it is the first that applies the capability approach. For adoption studies on digital technologies in healthcare and beyond, our study poses two major theoretical implications: (1) when considering how outcome expectations affect adoption, scholars should consider how digital technologies allow people to live their lives in ways that are valuable to them, rather than considering how technologies help to execute predefined tasks, jobs, or activities; (2) the availability of digital technologies should be considered as a mediator between outcome expectations and intention to use technologies.     

Impact of sensor nodes scaling and velocity on handover mechanisms for healthcare wireless sensor networks with mobility support

Health promotion in hospital environments can be improved using the most recent information and communication technologies. The Internet connectivity to small sensor nodes carried by patients allows remote access to their bio-signals. To promote these features the healthcare wireless sensor networks (HWSN) are used. In these networks mobility support is a key issue in order to keep patients under real-time monitoring even when they move around. To keep sensors connected to the network, they should change their access points of attachment when patients move to a new coverage area along an infirmary. This process, called handover, is responsible for continuous network connectivity to the sensors. This paper presents a detailed performance evaluation study considering three handover mechanisms for healthcare scenarios (Hand4MAC, RSSI-based, and Backbone-based). The study was performed by simulation using several scenarios with different number of sensors and different moving velocities of sensor nodes. The results show that Hand4MAC is the best solution to guarantee almost continuous connectivity to sensor nodes with less energy consumption.     

用电子医疗重构医疗产业生态系统

针对传统医疗产业生态系统的困境，阐述了电子医疗，包括移动穿戴等智能终端、可移动访问的EHR等新兴技术与业务的发展，给医疗产业生态系统带来的变革，并提出了相关产业战略与政策建议。     

Using soft computing to define standards of care in glaucoma monitoring

A fuzzy knowledge base encapsulating core expert rules for glaucoma follow up is developed and subsequently refined into a standard of care by reconciling several expert opinions. The Learning from Examples (LFE) [1] technique is used in addition to expert interviews to generate fuzzy rules from numerical data, and soft competition defines a fuzzy consensus metrics for the expert opinions. Web-based extension of this system into a comprehensive set of e-Health services for the glaucoma community enables, besides wide accessibility of the expert knowledge, continuous improvement of the core rule set (standard of care) with the perspectives of several experts.This work is funded under Collaborative Health Research Project Grant by the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of TransferTech GmbH Germany(www.Transfertech.de) with their soft computing software suite as well as their valuable insights in solving the implementation challenges we are faced with constantly.