The number of wearable wireless sensors is expected to grow to 400 million by the year 2014, while the number of operational mobile subscribers has already passed the 5.2 billion mark in 2011. This growth results in an increasing number of mobile applications including: Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, Electronic-Health (eHealth), and Mobile-Health (mHealth). A number of emerging mobile applications that require 3G and 4G mobile networks for data transport relate to telemedicine, including establishing, maintaining, and transmitting health-related information, research, education, and training. This review paper takes a closer look at these applications, specifically with regard to the healthcare industry and their underlying link technologies. The authors believe that the BlackBerry platform and the associated infrastructure (i.e., BlackBerry Enterprise Server) is a logical and practical solution for eHealth, mHealth, sensor and M2M deployments, which are considered in this paper.

Link Technologies and BlackBerry Mobile Health (mHealth) Solutions: A Review

The information and communication technology infrastructure available in rural and remote areas may often not have the bandwidth to support all types of telehealth applications; therefore, for example, some traditionally envisaged videoconferencing-based telehealth applications may not be able to be used or not used in their anticipated form at this time. While the level of broadband services available may impose limitations on these types of telehealth applications, in this review article, we identify applications that allow the maximizing of telehealth benefits in the presence of low-bandwidth connectivity and have potential benefits well-matched to rural and remote area healthcare challenges. In particular, we include consideration of how ubiquitous computing might potentially bring non-traditional approaches to telehealth that can also come into usage more immediately in bandwidth-constrained rural and regional areas. In this article, we review the benefits of ubiquitous computing for rural and remote telehealth including social media-based preventative, peer support and public health communication, mobile phone platforms for the detection and notification of emergencies, wearable and ambient biosensors, the utilization of personal health records including in conjunction with mobile and sensor platforms, chronic condition care and management information systems, and mobile device---enabled video consultation.

Telehealth and ubiquitous computing for bandwidth-constrained rural and remote areas

Google Glass is a recently designed wearable device capable of displaying information in a smartphone-like hands-free format by wireless communication. The Glass also provides convenient control over remote devices, primarily enabled by voice recognition commands. These unique features of the Google Glass make it useful for medical and biomedical applications where hands-free experiences are strongly preferred. Here, we report for the first time, an integral set of hardware, firmware, software, and Glassware that enabled wireless transmission of sensor data onto the Google Glass for on-demand data visualization and real-time analysis. Additionally, the platform allowed the user to control outputs entered through the Glass, therefore achieving bi-directional Glass-device interfacing. Using this versatile platform, we demonstrated its capability in monitoring physical and physiological parameters such as temperature, pH, and morphology of liver- and heart-on-chips. Furthermore, we showed the capability to remotely introduce pharmaceutical compounds into a microfluidic human primary liver bioreactor at desired time points while monitoring their effects through the Glass. We believe that such an innovative platform, along with its concept, has set up a premise in wearable monitoring and controlling technology for a wide variety of applications in biomedicine.

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Google Glass-Directed Monitoring and Control of Microfluidic Biosensors and Actuators.

Recent technological advances in miniaturization of wireless portable bio-sensors and the versatility of smart phones have enabled the design and proliferation of continuous mobile health monitoring. A single smart phone is used as a gateway that interconnects sensors and remote servers in many health networking platforms. However, previous implementations lack a thorough assessment of the phone as they conduct evaluations with only the monitoring program running on it. In this paper, we examine the practicality of a smart phone through test-bed experiments in which the health monitoring software is running together with various smart phone applications. Based on the experiment results and observations, we conclude that a single smart phone is not adequate to satisfy full utilization of both the health monitoring service and the smart phone functionality. To ensure full utilization, we propose a PHM-Gate (Personal Health Monitoring Gateway). PHM-Gate is a special device that removes the restrictions caused by using a single gateway. A Bluetooth communication technique that enables PHM-Gate to successfully perform the monitoring tasks in collaboration with a smart phone is presented in this paper.

Personal gateway in mobile health monitoring

Sensor and electronic-health networks are widely utilized at home and in industry/research applications. In a local sense, a sensor-to-sensor network can have a range of a few meters to a couple of hundred meters ZigBee Pro can extend this range up to 2000 m. With the deployment of mobile technology in the healthcare space mobile-Health 'm-Health' and using cellular coverage, the range can virtually be unbounded. However, supporting bounded delay end-to-end delay, class of service, and quality of service for critical sensor-mHealth applications may become challenging. This challenge can be alarmingly extended when thousands of users run their sensor-mHealth applications simultaneously and depend on limited coverage of the cell tower to transmit their health-related data across. In this paper we will discuss how the 3rd Generation Partnership Project-Long Term Evolution networks can address such aggregation issues, and discuss the challenges and provide recommendations.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

LTE networking: extending the reach for sensors in mHealth applications

The body area sensor network is widely regarded as a key technology that holds promise of enabling low-cost healthcare to be accessible to the fast growing aging sector of the population. The popularity of smartphones with their open operating systems provides a powerful platform for developing very low-cost personalized healthcare applications. In addition to the requirement of low cost, the limited battery life and the implementation of bio-signal processing software in resource-constrained smartphone platforms are two practical challenges. In this work, we present the design and implementation considerations of such a smartphone-centered platform for low-cost continuous health monitoring based on commercial-off-the-shelf wireless wearable biosensors, which are anticipated to proliferate in the market in the near future. As a case study, this platform approach has been implemented utilizing photoplethysmographic biosensors and different smartphones to measure heart rate, breathing rate, oxygen saturation, and estimate obstructive sleep apnea. The two aforementioned practical challenges have been addressed in detail from a systemlevel design perspective. The case study result confirms the many advantages of the suggested system, including the closed loop control capability, portability and upgradability.

Stephen Chiu Kwok Lam

Papers

A smartphone-centric platform for personal health monitoring using wireless wearable biosensors