Short range wireless Connected healthcare
Interoperable medical devices are key building blocks to providing enhanced medical services but, as Naveen Kodandaram explains, providing the right information is key
Consider the following scenarios:
■ A patient with known condition of heart disease is undergoing irregular heart beat or experiencing a situation of heart failure.
■ Insulin shocks (Low blood sugar or Hypoglycemia) are a common phenomenon in insulin-dependent diabetics. Many diabetics don’t recognise that they are going into insulin shocks, though there could be several physiological symptoms.
■ A high risk expectant mother whose amniotic sack is broken.
■ As we age, our muscles typically weaken. The muscles around the trachea (windpipe) also weaken causing the windpipe to narrow resulting in sleep Apnea and sleep disorders, in few cases low blood pressure, leading to heart attacks and heart failure.
■ Recognising and differentiating if a person is having a heat stroke or heart attack.
A depressing list for rather too many of us but given the current situation of personal healthcare, for all of the above cases (most of which may be chronic diseases), a lot remains dependent on the patient or the carer with the patient to identify and report any abnormality for emergency care. In such scenarios vital moments are lost, or even a life can be lost as the emergency care gets notified too late, and as a result arrives too late. These situations can be avoided if there is little or no dependency on the patient or care taker to report emergency situations well ahead of time or at least just in time.
The question then is - how can a healthcare service provider get the right information of a patient’s condition at the right time to provide the best healthcare?
Implementation challenges A few of the challenges that might be encountered in implementing connectivity solutions between the patient and the solution provider are:
■ Availability of personal healthcare medical devices and applications that have no hassles in connecting or interfacing with each other. This also gives larger choice and personal convenience for a patient to pick a device.
■ Implants or patches which can serve for varied chronic diseases like – Diabetes, Low/High Blood pressure, Apnea, etc.
10 July/August 2010
■ Communication between monitoring applications on a cell phone or PDA like device with the health care service provider
■ Interoperability and standards compliance: Adoption of standards like HL7, DICOM, etc., for interoperable data across different networks, systems, hospitals, etc.
■ Billing and accounting for health care services: The integration of government scheme, insurance, payment to service providers and hospital could be a challenge.
Monitoring devices are evolving to be implantable with wireless communication. Blood glucose sensors and heart monitoring is now implantable. Bluetooth is coming up with new specifications called BT LE (Bluetooth Low Energy) which fits the implantable
requirements well. Enabling the implantable devices to communicate with an aggregator device would then enable transferring and sharing the data with hospital, doctor or service provider.
Leaders in Bluetooth technology which have proven Health Device Profile (HDP) and have been interoperability tested at various unplugged fests will compete as choices for Bluetooth technology and Bluetooth-enabled devices. Cell phones now have a very high user base and can be made as one of the data aggregator devices to receive data from the monitoring devices over wireless technology like Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a standard feature in the phones. One of the challenges that exist today is the interoperability of medical devices with the applications located on a PC or a phone. Today’s technology allows for implementation of a well connected and coordinated network. A network of health and vital monitoring devices, an aggregator device that collects patient data from the monitoring devices, sends the data to a monitoring centre and hospital or server (to maintain patient records) that provides the healthcare service.
Adoption of the Continua Alliance supported IEEE 11073 (see panel) standard eliminates the interoperability related issues between the medical devices and their applications. Now this only simplifies the problem on one side of the spectrum.
Components in Electronics
The next challenge is on the data that is sent to hospital or server. Can any healthcare service provider or a doctor who is away from the patient view the data without any issue? If the data and the applications interfaces viewing data are not standardised, expansion and globalisation of the service becomes a challenge. An application on the cell phone collects data from the implant in the patient and then transmits the data using either 3G or CDMA technology (both of which support transfer of large data if required) to the monitoring centre of the health care service provider. The patient data is also being simultaneously sent to servers which are hosted by hospitals or service providers for record keeping. Applications at the monitoring centre can raise alarms when they detect abnormality in the data received from
Continua Alliance
Continua Health Alliance is a non- profit, open industry coalition organisation with over 220 member companies around the world. It helps in defining specification for interoperability of the medical devices and applications through the adoption of the IEEE 11073 standard. This standard can reside over a Bluetooth stack (wireless monitoring device) or a USB driver (when we have
the patient side. Also, the application on the cell phone can also raise alarms on which a patient or caretaker could take action. The GPS along with the application on the cell phone or PDA could also provide location coordinates of the patient where emergency healthcare personal can be reached. With interoperable devices exchanging data with interoperable health information data applications, we can now use existing technologies in the communication industry to keep the patient, health care service provider and doctor always connected and ensure emergency health care is just a few minutes away.
MindTree |
www.mindtree.com Naveen Kodandaram is Technical Director, heading the Medical Practice at MindTree
a wired monitoring device). When health care monitoring
devices and their applications become interoperable, this technology becomes as simple as connecting any Bluetooth headset to a Bluetooth enabled cell phone or attaching a pen drive or USB mouse to a PC. MindTree’s implementation of
Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE), IEEE 11073 stack and the device specialisation layers, was shown at the Continua event in October 2009.
www.cieonline.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44