WTH 2014 - Wireless Technologies and Healthcare: Applications, Requirements, and Emerging Research

The introduction of telecommunications in healthcare has led to an increased accessibility to healthcare providers, more efficient tasks and processes, and a higher quality of healthcare services. However, many challenges, including a significant number of medical errors, considerable stress on healthcare providers, and a partial coverage of healthcare services in rural and underserved areas worldwide, still exist. These combined with an increasing cost of healthcare services, such as the cost of healthcare services reaching to 19% of Gross National Product for U.S., and an exponential increase in the number of seniors and retirees in developed countries have created several major challenges for policy makers, healthcare providers, hospitals, insurance companies and patients. Wireless healthcare, or pervasive healthcare, is considered a solution to many of these problems as well as a possible future of healthcare services. In simple terms, wireless healthcare can be defined as healthcare to anyone, anytime, and anywhere by removing locational, time and other restraints while increasing both the coverage and quality of healthcare. The broad definition includes prevention, healthcare maintenance and checkups, short-term monitoring (or home healthcare monitoring), long-term monitoring (nursing home), personalized healthcare monitoring, incidence detection and management, and, emergency intervention, transportation and treatment. In this tutorial, we present an introduction of wireless and mobile technologies, present wireless healthcare applications, derive requirements and wireless solutions, and discuss the future and open issues. More specifically, we discuss how wireless technologies can be applied to achieve wide-scale patient monitoring in and out of hospitals and nursing homes, location management, intelligent emergency system, and mobile telemedicine applications. Additionally, some open issues and research challenges in pervasive healthcare are also discussed.
List of Topics
- Current wireless technologies: Architecture, Protocols and Usage Models
Sensors and RFID
Wireless LANs
Ad hoc wireless networks
3G/4G Cellular Networks
Satellites
Fixed wireless
Bluetooth and PANs
Smart and wearable computing
- Various Healthcare Challenges and Current Technologies
Access
Quality
Limited resources
Medical errors
- Applications, Requirements and Wireless Solutions
Pervasive healthcare
Mobile Telemedicine
Wireless Health Monitoring
Wireless Emergency Management Systems
Health-aware Mobile Devices
Smart Medication Management
Smart Homes
Context-awareness in healthcare
Wireless decision making & cognitive load
- Future/Open issues of Wireless in Healthcare
Personalization of Healthcare
Wireless in emergencies
Wireless in mental health, addiction and overdose management
Training of healthcare professionals for wireless technologies
Reducing the cost of delivering healthcare services by wireless infrastructure
Legal and regulatory issues including liability and law-suits
Speaker’s Biography
Prof. Upkar Varshney is on the faculty of Computer Information Systems (Associate Professor) at Georgia State University, Atlanta (http://www.cis.gsu.edu/~uvarshne). He received a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering with Honors from University of Roorkee (now Indian Institute of Technology, IIT-Roorkee), and, MS in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Telecommunications & Networking, from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His research and teaching interests include wireless networks, pervasive healthcare, and mobile commerce.. He has written over 130 papers in these topics in major journals and international conferences. Several of his papers are among the most cited references in wireless and healthcare. He is the founding chair of International Pervasive Health Conference (since 2006) and is the author of Pervasive Healthcare Computing book (2009).
Prof. Varshney has delivered several keynote speeches and has presented more than 30 extremely well received tutorials and workshops at major international conferences. Upkar has received several teaching awards, including Myrone T. Greene Outstanding Teaching Award (2000 and 2004), and RCB College Distinguished Teaching Award (2002). He is an associate editor/member of editorial board for IEEE Access, IEEE Computer, IEEE Transactions on IT in BioMedicine, and International Journal Interdisciplinary Telecommunications & Networking (IJITN).