Page 251 - ITU Kaleidoscope 2016

ICTs for a Sustainable World

of users through a mesh network of health kiosks. data irrespective of the patient and clinician locations
and time-of-the-day to provide to the healthcare prac-
titioners a comprehensive view of the patient’s history
2.1. A Mesh of Health Kiosks
for better patient care.
• Data analytics. As illustrated by Figure 1, the doc-
tor or ambulance may access the situation awareness
gateway via the Internet from anywhere and anytime.
In the rural settings with shortage of healthcare profes-
sionals and facilities, the data analytics provided over-
the-cloud by a situation awareness gateway can be a
great service to the public health sector as it can speed
up medical diagnosis, treatment and reduce the costs
of laboratory tests which usually constitute a large por-
tion of medical expenditures.
• Data sharing. The cloud-based IoT infrastructure is an
infrastructure spanning various settings and geogra-
phies, shared between authorized participants with
the expectation of improving healthcare service de-
livery and improve operational efficiency. Such an
Figure 1: The Cyber Healthcare Model infrastructure can enable participatory consultation,
facilitating the interaction of different medical special-
A Cyber-healthcare deployment model is depicted by Fig- ists, when required, to improve the medical diagnosis,
ure 1. It is built around the idea of a mesh of health kiosks health care support and many other services that could
infrastructure where 1) the bio-sensors of an e-Health kit not be availed to citizens without its presence.
are used in a health kisok to capture patient vital signs 2)
• Real-time updates. Using a cloud-based IoT infras-
they are stored in the nodes of the sensor network and ag-
tructure also enables real-time updates of patients’
gregated at cluster heads and 3) they are relayed to a sink
medical history (consultations, prescriptions, hospital-
node connected to a micro cloud where data analytics are
ization) which are useful for future treatment valida-
performed to achieve situation awareness (condition recogni-
tion.
tion and patient prioritization) and where the information is
shared among a number of organizations or entities. The ob-
As presented in figure 1, the Cyber-healthcare relies on a net-
jective is to provide doctors, institutions, emergency workers,
worked digital health infrastructure where a) the bio-sensor
public health planners and bio-medical researchers access to
devices are equipped with different sensors aimed at cap-
an integrated health care system for planning, utilization and
turing different body vital signs b) communication between
advanced research, while preserving the privacy of individ-
nodes of the network is achieved indoor or outdoor depend-
ual’s data. Some of the advantages of such a deployment
ing on the localization of the vital signs capturing modules c)
when applied to the developing world context include:
the routing of the sensor readings over these links is achieved
• System accuracy. A medical bio-sensors e-Health kit by different protocols including WiFi and the 802.15.4 pro-
provides a way of replacing the error-prone manual pa- tocols d) the micro-cloud infrastructure is equipped with a
tient vital signs capture process by more accurate auto- patient prioritization server and can be a component of a fed-
mated procedures. Furthermore, the use of intelligent erated cloud infrastructure shared by several hospitals in ru-
software for situation recognition has the advantage of ral settings of the developing world and e) owing to the lack
providing accurate approaches used as support to the or intermittent energy supply in the developing world, the
healthcare providers in order to reduce diagnostic er- system proposed in this paper is endowed with a wind/solar
rors. power source.
• Cost saving. When deployed in a hospital or health
care centre, a simple e-health kit could be used by 2.2. The Patient Prioritization System
many patients or shared by a community to reduce
As illustrated by Figure 2, the patient prioritization sys-
cost. Furthermore, using the cloud can result in a col-
tem proposed in this paper has four main components: a) a
laborative economic environment where the overhead
database storage used to store the medical record history of
costs are shared among the participants and the costs
the patients, time stamped patient physiological parameter
for exchanging and sharing patient’s data are tremen-
readings from the bio-medical sensors and also the Triage
dously reduced.
results (or scores) for every patient record b) a scoring sys-
• Data availability. Using a cloud-based IoT infrastruc- tem which builds from the WHO standardized table of vital
ture allows easy storing and remote access to medical parameter risk zones [1] to acquire domain knowledge in

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