By Roland Piquepaille
A vast majority of long-term patients in the world don't take their medication in time, intentionally or not. In the U.S. alone, this represents an additional $100 billion yearly expense due to unexpected emergency hospital admissions. It is therefore crucial to gather accurately patient medical data in real time. For this purpose, a team at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory has developed a mobile health toolkit to perform this task. With this toolkit consisting of a Java-based middleware and Bluetooth-enabled sensors, all the medical patient data can be wirelessly exported to a doctor's office via a PC or a cell phone. Read more...Here are some facts to start with.
About 55% of all long-term patients in the US and in Europe, it is estimated, do not take their medication (either not taking the prescribed medication at all or more than 14 hours late) Around 12% of all hospital admissions in the UK are due to this non-compliance, the damage to the US taxpayer is an estimated USD 100 billion a year. Most of the patients that do not comply are simply forgetful (about 10% deliberately do not want to take the medication).
So how can we solve this problem?
Gathering current patient medical data promptly and accurately is vital to proper health care. The usefulness of electronic data capture (EDC) has been demonstrated in applications such as the home monitoring of at-risk heart patients via devices that transmit blood pressure from the home to a central database. Removing transcription effort (and associated inaccuracies) alone is worth the institution of EDC; but the side benefit of timeliness offers the hope of identifying and responding to trends as they occur, perhaps preventing a dangerous event, instead of simply allowing its diagnosis after the danger has manifest.
This is why IBM has developed its mobile health toolkit, "for gathering measurement data from a range of devices, and present it to management software via a well defined, and easily implemented interface."
This illustration shows various devices, such as "a Bluetooth attached blood pressure cuff (left) and pill box (right) sending data to the mobile phone via Bluetooth. The mobile hub software integrated into the mobile phone (center) forwards the data to a care centre for monitoring (screen in the back) and returns reminders or alarms in an emergency." (Credits: IBM and a former article in ERCIM News, "Remote Monitoring of Health Conditions.")
Here are some details about this toolkit.
The IBM mobile health toolkit provides a Java-based middleware -- using J2ME MIDP 2.0 (Java Mobile Information Device Profile) and JSR 082 (Java APIs for Bluetooth) -- running on a personal (mobile) hub device to which sensors can connect wirelessly. We can perform local processing on the data, and forward the result to one or more fixed network connections. Data-handling modules can easily be added to the MIDlet suite (application suite compliant with Java Mobile Information Device Profile) on the hub, as can drivers for new sensor devices.
Using a wireless link from the hub to the devices allows the hub to be placed in an unobtrusive location, saves the user from fiddling with cables, and saves the sensor manufacturer the trouble of finding an acceptable case location for the data connector. By requiring only Bluetooth, MIDP support, and a network connection from the hub, the range of suitable hardware choices for the hub extends from full PCs, through OSGi home gateway units, all the way to cellular phones.
For more information, you can visit the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory website, and more specifically, the IBM Mobile Health Toolkit page, which states the following.
Solutions based on the IBM mobile health toolkit can improve the quality of patient monitoring while reducing overall healthcare costs. Moreover, it ensures that more timely information is available to medical caregivers. Medication-compliance systems can leverage the toolkit as a basis for intelligent reminders. For example, patients can be prompted to take their medication if the system detects that it is overdue.
Finally, for a more relaxed tone -- say, less corporate --, you can check the site of one of the IBM researchers involved in this project, Dirk Husemann.
Sources: Dirk Husemann and Michael Nidd, IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, in ERCIM News No. 60, January 2005; and other IBM web pages
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