Demo -- CellChek: Demonstrating a Cost-effective Cell Phone-based Patient Monitoring and Advising System* Mostafa Izz1
[email protected]. edu.eg
Yossuf Khazbak1 yossuf.khazbak@ gmail.com
Tamer Elbatt1, 2
[email protected]
Moustafa Youssef3 moustafa.youssef@ ejust.edu.eg
Categories and Subject Descriptors J.3 [Life and Medical Sciences]: information systems; Health
Keywords Health-care, Mobility, Cost-Effective
1. INTRODUCTION Motivation: The ubiquity of mobile phones witnessed today along with the growing need for enhanced medical services worldwide provide a unique opportunity to save costs and introduce mHealth services, especially for low-income communities. Objectives: In this demo, we exhibit the novel concept of costeffective mobile healthcare which “optimally” leverages the multiple wireless interfaces onboard most mobile phones today. The demo, coined CellChek, is a proof-of-concept testbed that showcases a cost-effective, cell phone-based patient monitoring and advising system. System Overview: CellChek leverages mobile phone sensors, as well as bluetooth-enabled on-body medical devices. The Wireless Interface Selection Algorithm (WISA) constitutes the core cost-saving mechanism which decides the minimum cost wireless interface for uploading the medical data to the healthcare provider. In addition, our research explores the benefits, and potential trade-offs, of leveraging “free” short range phone-tophone communications (via Bluetooth/WiFi) for disseminating medical advisory messages to a target group of co-located individuals. This gives rise to a fundamental cost-delay trade-off that is modeled and formulated as a constrained optimization problem and solved in closed-form. The proposed CellChek demo is targeted towards enabling remote periodic checkups as well as detecting abnormal medical conditions for high-risk patients.
2. THE CellChek DEMO Description: CellCheck demo is based on a Windows Mobile phone which hosts the major software components. It will demonstrate the following software modules and technologies: i) Establishing connection between the two medical devices in use, namely Pulse Oximeter[2] and Blood Pressure Monitor[3], and the smart phone application software using Bluetooth and ii) The WISA algorithm in the works deciding the minimum cost wireless interface, for uploading patients’ data to the remote medical facility. In addition, the demo shows the usage of the internal mobile accelerometer for fall/activity detection. Finally, the demo exhibits the web interface of the medical facility [1] that is used to manage the medical profiles for the Application users. 1
2 Cairo University Nile University 3 Egypt Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST) * This work was funded in part by a research grant from Microsoft Research under the Mobile Healthcare for Africa Awards program.
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). MobiSys’12, June 25–29, 2012, Low Wood Bay, Lake District, UK. ACM 978-1-4503-1301-8/12/06.
Figure 1: CellChek System Overview
The demo hosts three major research components: I. As opposed to simply uploading the medical data using 3G cellular (Baseline), WISA examines the mobile phone wireless interfaces, in sequence, starting with the zero cost option(s) Thus, it first checks free WiFi, If not available, it compares the cost of using SMS/MMS (for plain text and images, respectively) to the cellular data plan, given the data size, modality and QoS. Towards this objective, we develop a Data Transfer Accounting (DTA) module for 3G cellular plans. II. DTA module hinges on the proposed “generic” cost model that not only covers a variety of 3G cellular pricing plans offered by major mobile operators in Egypt (e.g., Vodafone), ranging from “Pay-per-MByte”, “Pay-Per-Hour” to “Unlimited”, but also captures the dynamics of plan usage for other purposes other than medical as well as the medical data transfer timing relative to plan commencement date. It relies on the pre-stored parameters of the plan in use, namely limited quota and time limit, among other parameters, to compute the cellular data transfer cost. III. The medical facility server represents the CellChek backend at the healthcare provider (HCP) side and hosts a database for the registered patients, web services for communication between the server and the mobile devices and a website [1] that serves as the HCP end-user GUI for the purpose of monitoring remote patients’ status updates. It is the central point for the data gathered from all system subscribers and can be used to remotely monitor the status of the patients 24/7, fire up alarms in case of emergencies, and send advisory information, as needed. Finally, CellChek leverages the Accelerometer to detect sudden falls and fire up alarms at the medical facility. In case of an emergency situation, CellChek generates a medical profile that describes the patient’s latest status and sends the data directly to the web server. If unable to reach the server (due to lack of Internet access), then the data is sent via SMS to a pre-specified emergency number for the medical personnel.
3. REFERENCES [1] CellChek medical facility server website http://aspspider.info/cellcheck/web/default.aspx [2] http://www.nonin.com/PulseOximetry/Fingertip/Onyx9560 [3] http://www.aandd.jp/products/medical/bluetooth/ua_767pbt. html
