Health monitoring systems have rapidly evolved during the past two decades and have the potential to change the way health care is currently delivered. Although smart health monitoring systems automate patient monitoring tasks and, thereby improve the patient workflow management, their efficiency in clinical settings is still debatable. This paper presents a review of smart health monitoring systems and an overview of their design and modeling. Furthermore, a critical analysis of the efficiency, clinical acceptability, strategies and recommendations on improving current health monitoring systems will be presented. The main aim is to review current state of the art monitoring systems and to perform extensive and an in-depth analysis of the findings in the area of smart health monitoring systems. In order to achieve this, over fifty different monitoring systems have been selected, categorized, classified and compared. Finally, major advances in the system design level have been discussed, current issues facing health care providers, as well as the potential challenges to health monitoring field will be identified and compared to other similar systems.

Smart health monitoring systems: an overview of design and modeling.

Wearable health monitoring is an emerging technology for continuous monitoring of vital signs including the electrocardiogram (ECG). This signal is widely adopted to diagnose and assess major health risks and chronic cardiac diseases. This paper focuses on reviewing wearable ECG monitoring systems in the form of wireless, mobile and remote technologies related to older adults. Furthermore, the efficiency, user acceptability, strategies and recommendations on improving current ECG monitoring systems with an overview of the design and modelling are presented. In this paper, over 120 ECG monitoring systems were reviewed and classified into smart wearable, wireless, mobile ECG monitoring systems with related signal processing algorithms. The results of the review suggest that most research in wearable ECG monitoring systems focus on the older adults and this technology has been adopted in aged care facilitates. Moreover, it is shown that how mobile telemedicine systems have evolved and how advances in wearable wireless textile-based systems could ensure better quality of healthcare delivery. The main drawbacks of deployed ECG monitoring systems including imposed limitations on patients, short battery life, lack of user acceptability and medical professional's feedback, and lack of security and privacy of essential data have been also discussed.

A comprehensive survey of wearable and wireless ECG monitoring systems for older adults

Mobile phones are becoming increasingly important in monitoring and delivery of healthcare interventions. They are often considered as pocket computers, due to their advanced computing features, enhanced preferences and diverse capabilities. Their sophisticated sensors and complex software applications make the mobile healthcare (m-health) based applications more feasible and innovative. In a number of scenarios user-friendliness, convenience and effectiveness of these systems have been acknowledged by both patients as well as healthcare providers. M-health technology employs advanced concepts and techniques from multidisciplinary fields of electrical engineering, computer science, biomedical engineering and medicine which benefit the innovations of these fields towards healthcare systems. This paper deals with two important aspects of current mobile phone based sensor applications in healthcare. Firstly, critical review of advanced applications such as; vital sign monitoring, blood glucose monitoring and in-built camera based smartphone sensor applications. Secondly, investigating challenges and critical issues related to the use of smartphones in healthcare including; reliability, efficiency, mobile phone platform variability, cost effectiveness, energy usage, user interface, quality of medical data, and security and privacy. It was found that the mobile based applications have been widely developed in recent years with fast growing deployment by healthcare professionals and patients. However, despite the advantages of smartphones in patient monitoring, education, and management there are some critical issues and challenges related to security and privacy of data, acceptability, reliability and cost that need to be addressed.

Mobile healthcare applications: system design review, critical issues and challenges

The growing worldwide population has increased the need for technologies, computerised software algorithms and smart devices that can monitor and assist patients anytime and anywhere and thus enable them to lead independent lives. The real-time remote monitoring of patients is an important issue in telemedicine. In the provision of healthcare services, patient prioritisation poses a significant challenge because of the complex decision-making process it involves when patients are considered `big data'. To our knowledge, no study has highlighted the link between `big data' characteristics and real-time remote healthcare monitoring in the patient prioritisation process, as well as the inherent challenges involved. Thus, we present comprehensive insights into the elements of big data characteristics according to the six `Vs': volume, velocity, variety, veracity, value and variability. Each of these elements is presented and connected to a related part in the study of the connection between patient prioritisation and real-time remote healthcare monitoring systems. Then, we determine the weak points and recommend solutions as potential future work. This study makes the following contributions. (1) The link between big data characteristics and real-time remote healthcare monitoring in the patient prioritisation process is described. (2) The open issues and challenges for big data used in the patient prioritisation process are emphasised. (3) As a recommended solution, decision making using multiple criteria, such as vital signs and chief complaints, is utilised to prioritise the big data of patients with chronic diseases on the basis of the most urgent cases.

Based Real Time Remote Health Monitoring Systems: A Review on Patients Prioritization and Related Big Data Using Body Sensors information and Communication Technology

The burden on healthcare services in the world has increased substantially in the past decades. The quality and quantity of care have to increase to meet surging demands, especially among patients with chronic heart diseases. The expansion of information and communication technologies has led to new models for the delivery healthcare services in telemedicine. Therefore, mHealth plays an imperative role in the sustainable delivery of healthcare services in telemedicine. This paper presents a comprehensive review of healthcare service provision. It highlights the open issues and challenges related to the use of the real-time fault-tolerant mHealth system in telemedicine. The methodological aspects of mHealth are examined, and three distinct and successive phases are presented. The first discusses the identification process for establishing a decision matrix based on a crossover of `time of arrival of patient at the hospital/multi-services' and `hospitals' within mHealth. The second phase discusses the development of a decision matrix for hospital selection based on the MAHP method. The third phase discusses the validation of the proposed system.

Real-Time Fault-Tolerant mHealth System: Comprehensive Review of Healthcare Services, Opens Issues, Challenges and Methodological Aspects

With the increase in the number senior citizens and chronic diseases, the number of elderly patients who need constant assistance has increased. One key point of all critical care for elderly patient is the continuous monitoring of their vital signs. Among these, the ECG signal is used for noninvasive diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Also, there is a pressing need to have a proper system in place for patient identification. Errors in patient identification, and hence improper administration of medication can lead to disastrous results. This paper proposes a novel embedded mobile ECG reasoning system that integrates ECG signal reasoning and RF identification together to monitor an elderly patient. As a result, our proposed method has a good accuracy in heart beat recognition, and enables continuous monitoring and identification of the elderly patient when alone. Moreover, in order to examine and validate our proposed system, we propose a managerial research model to test whether it can be implemented in a medical organization. The results prove that the mobility, usability, and performance of our proposed system have impacts on the user's attitude, and there is a significant positive relation between the user's attitude and the intent to use our proposed system.

https://ir.nctu.edu.tw:443/bitstream/11536/5477/1/000278538300038.pdf

Shih-Bin Lin

Papers

An Embedded Mobile ECG Reasoning System for Elderly Patients