Reality TV moves on: Webcast Your Brain Surgery?

New York Times has an article about new hospital trends in the US. Methodist University Hospital in Memphis also sees an opportunity to promote the hospital to prospective patients by webcasting neurosurgery. A video Webcast of an awake patient during craniotomy, in which the patient remains conscious and talking while surgeons prod and cut inside her brain, was promoted with infomercials and newspaper advertisements featuring a photograph of a beautiful model, not the real (not so beatutiful) Ms. Mullins.

This time, Methodist did not use billboards as it has with other operations, deeming this procedure too sensitive. But its marketing department monitors how many people have watched the Webcast (2,212), seen a preview on YouTube (21,555) and requested appointments (3).

“The goal is to further our reputation as well as to educate the community, who will ask their physicians about our care,” said Jill Fazakerly, Methodist’s marketing director.

Faced with economic pressures and patients with abundant choices, hospitals are using unconventional, even audacious, ways of connecting directly with the public. Seeking to attract or educate patients, entice donors, gain recognition and recruit or retain top doctors, hospitals are using Twitter from operating rooms, showing surgery on YouTube and having patients blog about their procedures.

They consider the methods inexpensive ways to stand out in an era of reality TV and voluminous medical information available online.

Sensors tweet to Twitter

A Contiki Developer has made an API to Twitter enabling a twitterfeed from a TMote Sky to Tempkontiki. The Contiki sensortweets auoto-posts temperature and humidity data from a location in Stockholm. Read more about this on FreakLabs Blog and Contiki Developers.

Open Cloud Manifesto

The Open Cloud Manifesto is an culmination of may technologies including grid computing, SOA and WEB 2.0. The Cloud is still in the starting phase, and many issues related to Cloud Computing are still unsolved. How this technology will change ICT and Health IT is still to be seen. The linkage to uHealth is certainly interesting, and will have to be followed closely by those of us interested in body sensor networks.
See also the Open Cloud Manifesto Google Group and the Open Cloud Manifesto LikedIn Group for more information.

Multiplatform router by Libelium

Libelium provides Meshlium, a multitech router allowing use of ZigBee, Bluetooth, WiFi or GPRS. The company invites sensor producers to integrate on their Wasp mote platform: http://www.libelium.com/

ZigBee Health Care Public Application Profile

ZigBee Health Care provides a global standard for interoperable wireless devices enabling secure and reliable monitoring and management of noncritical, low-acuity healthcare services targeted at chronic disease management, obesity and ageing. ZigBee Health Care is designed for use in homes, fitness centers, retirement communities, nursing homes and a variety of medical care facilities. Products using ZigBee Health Care may be wearable, portable or fixed, depending on needs. ZigBee Health Care is designed to meet the requirements of a diverse and global ecosystem of consumers, service providers, care providers, payers, product manufacturers and policymakers. In addition, ZigBee Health Care products can interact with the broader ecosystem of ZigBee wireless technology devices that may be found in typical home and commercial settings.

 ZigBee Health Care

Sensor in a pill

 The WSN Blog reports from Wired Magazine about their countdown of what rocked our world in 2008; Edible Chips are featured #9 in the list.

Proteus, a Redwood City, California, company, has created tiny chips out of silicon grains that, once swallowed, activate in the stomach. The chips send a signal to an external patch that monitors vital parameters such as heart rate, temperature, state of wakefulness or body angle." This technology is truly interesting, and can be applied in a broad range of scenarios. Among central issues to scrutinize further are power supply, bandwidth, stability.

WSN Blog

A group of researchers have established the WSN Blog with the objective to create: "- a blog on Wireless Sensor Networks. We will cover new products, the latest papers, new books, applications of wsn, conferences". The WSN Blog is recommended for those interested, and a RSS feed is made available from the uHealth Blog.

EFMI STC 2008

The European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) Special Topic Conference (STC) is now taking place (9th-11th of September) at the British Computer Society buildings in Covent Garden, London, UK. Threre are about 50 participants coming from South- Africa, Cuba, and various European counties. The conference website is http://www.chirad.info/efmi_stc

Ubiquitous Knowledge Discovery

KDubiq is a EU funded Coordination Action (CA) in the FP7 Information Society and Technology program. The project period is from December 2005 to May 2008. More than 70 European companies, research and public sector institutions
are active KDubiq institutions. The main objectives are described as a joint Deliverable - a Blueprint on Ubiquitous Knowledge Discovery Systems - including relevant research topics and applications in this new research area. The KDubiq Blueprint gives the state-of-art on relevant research related to application requirements and technologies necessary for designing an information intensive system in ubiquitous environments.
A Summer School for Knowledge Discovery for Ubiquitous Computing with the objective to establish a common ground for the integration of the involved fields and to support the formation of a new community was recently held in Portugal as part of the KDUbiq CA.

Ubiquitous IT Europe conference report

The conference takes place in the old Bundestag buildings in Bonn, and has attracted 150 participants, 66% from Europe, 33% from Asia, and 1% from Australia. Among the audience are business rep's, researchers and politicians. uKorea and Korean companies as Samsung have had presentations. Among research challenges presented are; data processing, context-based adaptation, self-organizing networks and protocols, energy-aware systems and protocols, cross-layer optimization issues, security and privacy and human computer interface.
Peter Murray also have written about this event at http://differance-engine.net/krew/

Biomedical Wireless Sensor Network

The video shows a showcase demonstration of the IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN compliant sensor communication platform implementation for invasive blood pressure, ECG, pericardial accelerometer and a digital intrapleural drainage sytem applied during beating heart surgery. The showcase marked the end of the BWSN project involving 9 Scandinavian partners. From Sweden: Acreo, Ericsson R&D, Imego, Novosense and Millicore. From Finland: VTT.From Norway; MemsCap, The Interventional Centre and Novelda. The surgery was performed at the Interventional Centre at Rikshospitalet in Oslo, Norway

First Ubiquitous IT Europe Forum

The first European conference dedicated to uHealth is coming up in Bonn, Germany. Among organizers are University of Bonn, Fraunhofer IAIS, the Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, u-Korea Forum and Korea u-City Association. Find more information on the conference website:
The Ubiquitous IT Europe Forum organizes, in conjunction with the University of Bonn and Aving Global News Network, a series of conferences on the topic of ubiquitous computing.
The first event in this series takes place in Bonn, Germany between March 10th and 12th, 2008. The main objective is to bring together the Asian and European communities that actively work on ubiquitous technologies to foster the exchange of experiences and encourage future global collaborations. The conference will be held at the World Congress Center in Bonn, which is the former federal government Plenary Chamber.
Attendance is free, and the conference program has 16 sessions addressing uCity Technologies, European Projects, uApplications. In addition Keynotes and Panel Discussions are scheduled.

Digital plaster for personalized healthcare

An Ultra Low Power Intelligent Sensor Interface and Transceiver Platform has been developed by Toumaz. The BAN platform has a variety of sensors embedded in a plaster facilitating a wireless infrastructure
for intelligent, non-intrusive continuous monitoring,
to deliver a new wave
of lifestyle-compatible, personalised care applications – with
the potential to transform the treatment and management
of chronic diseases for millions of people.

By providing the complete infrastructure for an end-to-end telemedicine
system, this new integrated platform has the potential to revolutionise
the architecture of healthcare information systems, providing a unique
platform for analysis and decision-making based on real-time data.

Google Earth for the body

IBM has published this interesting application in their pressroom. This type of application with a graphical representation of the patients' body migt turn out as a very useful interface to EPR's not only for physicans. Especially interesting would be to give patients access to their own avatar and use this system in a Personal Health Record application.

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND 26 Sep 2007: IBM researchers today unveiled a prototype visualization software that allows doctors to interact with medical data the same way they interact with their patients: by looking at the human body.
Created at IBM's Zurich Research Lab, the technology uses an avatar -- a 3D representation of the human body -- to allow doctors to visualize patient medical records in an entirely new way. Called the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME), this innovative visualization method allows a doctor to click with the computer mouse on a particular part of the avatar "body" to trigger a search of
medical records to retrieve relevant information.
"It's like Google Earth for the body," said IBM Researcher Andre Elisseeff, who leads the healthcare projects at IBM's Zurich lab. "In hopes of speeding the move toward electronic healthcare records, we've tried to make information easily accessible for healthcare providers by combining medical data with visual representation, making it as simple as possible to interact with data that can improve patient care."

Sophisticated Web 2.0 application 2

A scenario in the uHealth setting might be the connection of the individual's wireless sensor data with knowledgebases and medical expert applications for clinical decision support. The Visual Medical Dictionary is an online dictionary. It goes beyond regular dictionaries by displaying an ontology context tree (MeSH based) and interactive network graph of related drugs, diseases and therapies. For example: a search for "psoriasis" will show a strong relationship with "Cyclosporine" and "Phototherapy" among other drugs and therapies. The providers of the service, Cure Hunter, also offer a Medline based Research Interface. The CureHunter Discovery Engine is the world's only fully unified and integrated numeric index of all known drugs, biologically active agents, diseases and empirical statements of all effective clinical outcomes published in the United States National Library of Medicine.

Sophisticated Web 2.0 application 1

PubGene  represents a new generation of fabulous applications developed to extrapolate information from the overwhelming amount of information pertaining to genomics and proteomics. Althoug currently not related to uHealth directly, this type of applications might at some point be related to data from the individual and utilized to provide information for research and further development of clinical decsision support in an uHealth setting?

The company webpage provides the following information:
PubGene is a new public service that  includes advanced biosearch tools, and a easy to use entry point to search for qualified PubGene gene and protein knowledge using Google and PubMed. Some of the features includes Sequence Homology - PARALIGN to perform Smith-Waterman accuracy sequence searches at BLAST speed, relating your biological sequences to their literature associations. A Network Browser - connecting genes to each other and to relevant keywords -including the functionality to query across 21 genomes combined.
PubGene provides up to date information on gene and protein relationships from the literature. It finds gene and protein relationships from your gene expression experiments. the application map mutations to genes, proteins, diseases, or processes, It integrates your confidential gene expression data and text databases. The user can design better array chips with up-to-date genetic information. The user can get pointers to pathway information and other metadata for your gene and protein clusters. The user can build sequence homology networks and relate them to literature, and more than 25,000 000 associations mapped to date.

Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Robotics in uHealth?

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is defined as "-the property of a system whereby the collective behaviours of (unsophisticated) agents interacting locally with their environment cause coherent functional global patterns to emerge. SI provides a basis with which it is possible to explore collective (or distributed) problem solving without centralized control or the provision of a global model. (ref;http://staff.washington.edu/paymana/swarm/)". The Wikipedia definition is: "Swarm intelligence (SI) is an artificial intelligence technique based around the study of collective behavior in decentralized, self-organized systems.
A relevant link here goes to Swarm robotics defined in Wikipedia as "- a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of relatively simple physical robots. The goal of this approach is to study the design of robots (both their physical body and their controlling behaviors) such that a desired collective behavior emerges from the inter-robot interactions and the interactions of the robots with the environment, inspired but not limited by the emergent behavior observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence. It has been discovered that a set of relatively primitive individual behaviors enhanced with communication will produce a large set of complex swarm behaviors."
The Wikipedia article on swarm robotics continues;
"Unlike distributed robotic systems in general, swarm robotics emphasizes a large number of robots, and promotes scalability, for instance, by using only local communication. Local communication is usually achieved by wireless transmission systems, using radio frequency or infrared communication.
Potential application for swarm robotics include tasks that demand for extreme miniaturization (nanorobotics, microbotics), on the one hand, as for instance distributed sensing tasks in micromachinery or the human body."
Swarm intelligence and swarm robotics  represents an interesting perspective to large scale ubiquitous/uHealth sensor networks applied in healthcare. The need for some kind of swarm intelligence is obvious with use of large numbers of sensors (ambient of BAN-type) and the need for systems for valuable data extraction from distributed sensors like motes or Sun Spots. Some level of problem solving capabilities are likely to be needed for handling of data streams. Both Tmote Sky motes and Sun SPOTS can be manually programmed "on the fly", passing updates from unit to unit in an epidemic manner. 

Sun SPOT- networked tiny computational systems on Sun's platform

Sun SPOT is a networked tiny computational system running on the IEEE 802.15.4.  2.4 GHz ISM radio frequency. The Sun SPOT technology operates on Java platform top to bottom. It provides the ability to run wireless transducer applications "on the metal"(directly on the CPU), saving overhead and improving performance. "SPOTworld" simplifies development by providing a single tool for programming, configuring, managing and monitoring Sun SPOT devices without any OS (operating system). The system handles strong security and has large scalability potential .
A jaw-droppingly cool "migratable application" functionality enables applications (with their complete state information) to be dragged from one Sun SPOT device to another while they're still running.
Sun SPOT is currently commercially available in the US only.
It will be interesting to follow developments of future healtcare applications based on the Sun SPOT platform. Read a Sun SPOT fact sheet.

Ubiquitous? pervasive? spime? - what's in a word?

What's the difference between 'ubiquitous computing' and 'pervasive computing'? Is there a difference? Does it matter?

I was reading an article on 'Effects of Pervasive Computing on Sustainable Development' ( >>> ) that began with the words 'Since pervasive computing is expected to become ubiquitous in the coming years ...' It set me off thinking about previous discussions of the differences between the terms, so I did a bit of Googling and Wikipedia'ing and came up with:

"Pervasive Computing" is: Shorthand for the strongly emerging trend toward:
* Numerous, casually accessible, often invisible computing devices
* Frequently mobile or imbedded in the environment
* Connected to an increasingly ubiquitous network structure
The aim is for easier computing, more available everywhere it's needed
(NIST Pervasive Computing Conference 2000 - http://www.nist.gov/pc2000/)

"Ubiquitous computing is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities ... someone "using" ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so.
(Wikipedia entry for 'Pervasive Computing' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pervasive_Computing)

Dictionary definitions are not much more help:
ubiquitous - adj : being present everywhere at once;
pervasive - adj : spread throughout;

And finally - the IEEE Pervasive Computing Journal (www.computer.org/portal/site/pervasive//) describes itself as 'A catalyst for advancing research and practice in mobile and ubiquitous computing' (sic).

So, they seem to be somewhat interchangeable.

And 'spime'? - that's a word made up by writer Bruce Sterling for a "currently-theoretical object that can be tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of the object ... spimes as coming through the convergence of six emerging technologies, related to both the manufacturing process for consumer goods, and through identification and location technologies.

These six facets of spimes are:
1. Small, inexpensive means of remotely and uniquely identifying objects over short ranges; in other words, radio-frequency identification.
2. A mechanism to precisely locate something on Earth, such as a global-positioning system.
3. A way to mine large amounts of data for things that match some given criteria, like internet search engines.
4. Tools to virtually construct nearly any kind of object; computer-aided design.
5. Ways to rapidly prototype virtual objects into real ones. Sophisticated, automated fabrication of a specification for an object, through “three-dimensional printers.”
6. “Cradle-to-cradle” life-spans for objects. Cheap, effective recycling.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spime)

Ubiquitous (or pervasive?) computing could be a way for spimes to be developed and used - it would be interesting to think about potential health applications.

Low-cost wireless vital sign monitoring project

A post on the SINI2007 blog ( >>> ) reports a project to develop low-cost wireless vital sign monitors that operate on TinyOS and mote platforms. The issue to note is that this is project being done by graduate and high school students!! - they are using physical parameter monitors and a wireless ad-hoc mesh network. They have already done some trials and are seeking clinical trial partners for additional pilots.