Advancements in medical science and technology, medicine and public health coupled with increased consciousness about nutrition and environmental and personal hygiene have paved the way for the dramatic increase in life expectancy globally in the past several decades. However, increased life expectancy has given rise to an increasing aging population, thus jeopardizing the socio-economic structure of many countries in terms of costs associated with elderly healthcare and wellbeing. In order to cope with the growing need for elderly healthcare services, it is essential to develop affordable, unobtrusive and easy-to-use healthcare solutions. Smart homes, which incorporate environmental and wearable medical sensors, actuators, and modern communication and information technologies, can enable continuous and remote monitoring of elderly health and wellbeing at a low cost. Smart homes may allow the elderly to stay in their comfortable home environments instead of expensive and limited healthcare facilities. Healthcare personnel can also keep track of the overall health condition of the elderly in real-time and provide feedback and support from distant facilities. In this paper, we have presented a comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art research and development in smart home based remote healthcare technologies.

Smart Homes for Elderly Healthcare—Recent Advances and Research Challenges

Internet of Things: A survey on machine learning-based intrusion detection approaches

With the development of technologies, such as big data, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), digital twin is being applied in industry as a precision simulation technology from concept to practice. Further, simulation plays a very important role in the healthcare field, especially in research on medical pathway planning, medical resource allocation, medical activity prediction, etc. By combining digital twin and healthcare, there will be a new and efficient way to provide more accurate and fast services for elderly healthcare. However, how to achieve personal health management throughout the entire lifecycle of elderly patients, and how to converge the medical physical world and the virtual world to realize real smart healthcare, are still two key challenges in the era of precision medicine. In this paper, a framework of the cloud healthcare system is proposed based on digital twin healthcare (CloudDTH). This is a novel, generalized, and extensible framework in the cloud environment for monitoring, diagnosing and predicting aspects of the health of individuals using, for example, wearable medical devices, toward the goal of personal health management, especially for the elderly. CloudDTH aims to achieve interaction and convergence between medical physical and virtual spaces. Accordingly, a novel concept of digital twin healthcare (DTH) is proposed and discussed, and a DTH model is implemented. Next, a reference framework of CloudDTH based on DTH is constructed, and its key enabling technologies are explored. Finally, the feasibility of some application scenarios and a case study for real-time supervision are demonstrated.

A Novel Cloud-Based Framework for the Elderly Healthcare Services Using Digital Twin

Over the past few decades, we have witnessed a dramatic rise in life expectancy owing to significant advances in medical science and technology, medicine as well as increased awareness about nutrition, education, and environmental and personal hygiene. Consequently, the elderly population in many countries are expected to rise rapidly in the coming years. A rapidly rising elderly demographics is expected to adversely affect the socioeconomic systems of many nations in terms of costs associated with their healthcare and wellbeing. In addition, diseases related to the cardiovascular system, eye, respiratory system, skin and mental health are widespread globally. However, most of these diseases can be avoided and/or properly managed through continuous monitoring. In order to enable continuous health monitoring as well as to serve growing healthcare needs; affordable, non-invasive and easy-to-use healthcare solutions are critical. The ever-increasing penetration of smartphones, coupled with embedded sensors and modern communication technologies, make it an attractive technology for enabling continuous and remote monitoring of an individual’s health and wellbeing with negligible additional costs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research and developments in smartphone-sensor based healthcare technologies. A discussion on regulatory policies for medical devices and their implications in smartphone-based healthcare systems is presented. Finally, some future research perspectives and concerns regarding smartphone-based healthcare systems are described.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/9/2164/pdf

Smartphone Sensors for Health Monitoring and Diagnosis.

Breast cancer is a disease that occurs most often in female cancer patients. Early detection can significantly reduce the mortality rate. Microwave breast imaging, which is noninvasive and harmless to human, offers a promising alternative method to mammography. This paper presents a review of recent advances in microwave imaging for breast cancer detection. We conclude by introducing new research on a microwave imaging system with time-domain measurement that achieves short measurement time and low system cost. In the time-domain measurement system, scan time would take less than 1 sec, and it does not require very expensive equipment such as VNA.

/pdf/recent-advances-in-microwave-imaging-for-breast-cancer-43x18z1rnh.pdf

Recent Advances in Microwave Imaging for Breast Cancer Detection

The design and implementation of a wearable system to estimate the human reaction time (HRT) to visual stimulus based on two identical wireless motion sensors are described. Each sensor incorporates a motion sensor (gyroscope), a processor and a transceiver operating at the industrial, scientific and medical frequency of 2.45 GHz. Relevant tests to estimate the HRT are performed in two different scenarios including simple and recognition tests for 90 pairs of measurements. The obtained results are compared with a computer-based system to determine the accuracy of the proposed system. The root mean square error, standard deviation error and mean error of the results are 2.88, 6.17 and 0.3 ms for simple test while for recognition test as low as 3.34, 7.83 and 0.35 ms, respectively. The outcomes of the HRT estimation tests confirm HRT can increase by 40-87% due to increased fatigue levels.

https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1049/htl.2016.0106

Technique to estimate human reaction time based on visual perception.

In this paper, the design and implementation of an accurate, sensitive, and cost-effective near-field (NF) probe are discussed. The probe is based on the modulated scatterer technique (MST), providing very low perturbation on the field to be measured. It consists of a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) photodiode chip and an antenna acting as a scatterer. The optically modulated scatterer (OMS) essentially makes the NF measurements perturbation free. A matching network is added to the probe structure to increase its sensitivity. The radiation characteristics of the probe, including cross-polarization response and omnidirectional sensitivity, are both theoretically and experimentally investigated. Finally, the performance and reliability of the probe are studied by comparing the measured NF distributions to the simulated distributions.

Optically Modulated Probe for Precision Near-Field Measurements

This paper addresses the design and implementation of a real-time temperature monitoring system with applications in telemedicine. The system consists of a number of precision wireless thermometers which are conceived and realized to measure the patients' body temperature in hospitals and the intensive care units (ICUs). Each wireless thermometer incorporates an accurate semiconductor temperature sensor, a transceiver operating at 2.4 GHz and a microcontroller that controls the thermometer functionalities. An array of two thermometers are implemented and successfully evaluated in different scenarios, including free-space and in vivo tests. Also, an in-house developed computer software is used in order to visualize the measurements in addition to detecting rapid increase and alerting high body temperature. The agreement between the experimental data and reference temperature values is significant.

A temperature monitoring system incorporating an array of precision wireless thermometers

Thispaper presents the design and realization of a context-aware wireless health monitoring system for recording the heartbeat (HR) and respiration (RR) rate based on an indirect measurement approach. The system consists of a contact-less medical sensor as well as a communication infrastructure for handling the transmission and reception of the measured results. The contact-less sensor includes a highly sensitive tri-axial accelerometer, an accurate temperature and air pressure sensor that enable one to inspect patients' health condition by continuously monitoring of two critical signs related to the cardiorespiratory system. The developed system can also be utilized in performing a number of long-term inspection on the heart and lungs while measuring the HR and RR values in addition to calculating the HR and RR ratio, which is denoted by HRR. The obtained results show the potential of the developed system for versatile monitoring applications applied to telemedicine.

Hamidreza Memarzadeh-Tehran

Papers

Smart Homes for Elderly Healthcare—Recent Advances and Research Challenges

Technique to estimate human reaction time based on visual perception.

Optically Modulated Probe for Precision Near-Field Measurements

A temperature monitoring system incorporating an array of precision wireless thermometers

A wearable medical sensor for provisional healthcare