Mobile Health Technologies

This book offers a comprehensive report on the technological aspects of Mobile Health (mHealth) and discusses the main challenges and future directions in the field. It is divided into eight parts: (1) preventive and curative medicine; (2) remote health monitoring; (3) interoperability; (4) framework, architecture, and software/hardware systems; (5) cloud applications; (6) radio technologies and applications; (7) communication networks and systems; and (8) security and privacy mechanisms. The first two parts cover sensor-based and bedside systems for remotely monitoring patients’ health condition, which aim at preventing the development of health problems and managing the prognosis of acute and chronic diseases. The related chapters discuss how new sensing and wireless technologies can offer accurate and cost-effective means for monitoring and evaluating behavior of individuals with dementia and psychiatric disorders, such as wandering behavior and sleep impairments. The following two parts focus on architectures and higher level systems, and on the challenges associated with their interoperability and scalability, two important aspects that stand in the way of the widespread deployment of mHealth systems. The remaining parts focus on telecommunication support systems for mHealth, including radio technologies, communication and cloud networks, and secure health-related applications and systems. All in all, the book offers a snapshot of the state-of-art in mHealth systems, and addresses the needs of a multidisciplinary audience, including engineers, computer scientists, healthcare providers, and medical professionals, working in both academia and the industry, as well as stakeholders at government agencies and non-profit organizations.

Mobile Health Technologies, also known as mHealth technologies, have emerged, amongst healthcare providers, as the ultimate Technologies-of-Choice for the 21st century in delivering not only transformative change in healthcare delivery, but also critical health information to different communities of practice in integrated healthcare information systems. mHealth technologies nurture seamless platforms and pragmatic tools for managing pertinent health information across the continuum of different healthcare providers. mHealth technologies commonly utilize mobile medical devices, monitoring and wireless devices, and/or telemedicine in healthcare delivery and health research. Today, mHealth technologies provide opportunities to record and monitor conditions of patients with chronic diseases such as asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases (COPD) and diabetes mellitus. The intent of this book is to enlighten readers about the theories and applications of mHealth technologies in the healthcare domain.

M-health can be defined as the ‘emerging mobile communications and network technologies for healthcare systems.' This book paves the path toward understanding the future of m-health technologies and services and also introducing the impact of mobility on existing e-health and commercial telemedical systems. M-Health: Emerging Mobile Health Systems presents a new and forward-looking source of information that explores the present and future trends in the applications of current and emerging wireless communication and network technologies for different healthcare scenaria. It also provides a discovery path on the synergies between the 2.5G and 3G systems and other relevant computing and information technologies and how they prescribe the way for the next generation of m-health services. The book contains 47 chapters, arranged in five thematic sections: Introduction to Mobile M-health Systems, Smart Mobile Applications for Health Professionals, Signal, Image, and Video Compression for M-health Applications, Emergency Health Care Systems and Services, Echography Systems and Services, and Remote and Home Monitoring. This book is intended for all those working in the field of information technologies in biomedicine, as well as for people working in future applications of wireless communications and wireless telemedical systems. It provides different levels of material to researchers, computing engineers, and medical practitioners interested in emerging e-health systems. This book will be a useful reference for all the readers in this important and growing field of research, and will contribute to the roadmap of future m-health systems and improve the development of effective healthcare delivery systems.

Smart health technologies continue to gain research interest across the globe in this digital era. Researchers are focusing on advancements in healthcare systems to make human life better. Also, such advancements help in early disease diagnosis and prevention of the worst diseases. Designing smart healthcare systems is possible only because of recent developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT technologies. Though mHealth refers to all mobile devices which can communicate data, mobile phones are presently the most popular platform for mHealth delivery. Ninety-four percent of the world population owns/uses a mobile phone, making mobile phones an optimal delivery platform for mHealth interventions. mHealth may catalyse the healthcare delivery model from a historical/episodic model into a tangible/patient-centric model. mHealth is being viewed progressively by many as an essential technology metaphor to achieve rich, vigorous patient engagement, ultimately achieving a patient-centric paradigm change.This book will discuss diverse topics to explain the rapidly emerging and evolving mobile health and artificial perspective, the emergence of integrated platforms and hosted third-party tools, and the development of decentralized applications for various research domains. It presents various applications that are helpful for research scholars and scientists who are working toward identifying and pinpointing the potential of as well as the hindrances to mHealth. The wide variety in topics it presents offers readers multiple perspectives on a variety of disciplines.The aim of this edited book is to publish the latest research advancements in the convergence of automation technology, artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering and health informatics. This will help readers to grasp the extensive point of view and the essence of recent advances in this field. This book solicits contributions which include theory, case studies and computing paradigms pertaining to healthcare applications. The prospective audience would be researchers, professionals, practitioners, and students from academia and industry who work in this field. We hope the chapters presented will inspire future research from both theoretical and practical viewpoints to spur further advances in the field. A brief introduction about each chapter follows. Chapter 1 focuses on the role of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in healthcare which provides an overview of the various types of IoT devices and data generating equipment for medical information.In Chapter 2, the objective is to provide a brief discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of using IoT based technologies in healthcare such as wearable devices. Chapter 3 deals with important aspects of data science for healthcare systems, which includes various algorithms for decision support system algorithms. Chapter 4 discusses various innovative technologies like digital twins for healthcare and medical diagnosis.Chapter 5 discusses research investigating the long-term effects of pregnancy and lactation on the female body.Chapter 6 summarizes recent advances in machine and deep learning techniques for smart healthcare applications.Chapter 7 explores the research insights on using an artificial neural network with a wrapper-based feature selection to predict heart failure.Chapter 8 presents a review on context-aware mobile healthcare for smart health services in nursing homes.Chapter 9 focuses on certain machine learning methods that can help in early prediction of pandemics.Chapter 10 explores techniques and methods based on machine learning for malaria diagnosis.Chapter 11 is a complete discussion about mobile health technology to improve health-related quality of life of chronic disease patients in emerging economies.We are grateful to the authors and reviewers for their excellent contributions for making this book possible.

The use of mobile and wireless technologies to support the achievement of health objectives (mHealth) has the potential to transform the face of health service delivery across the globe. A powerful combination of factors is driving this change. These include rapid advances in mobile technologies and applications, a rise in new opportunities for the integration of mobile health into existing eHealth services, and the continued growth in coverage of mobile cellular networks. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), there are now over 5 billion wireless subscribers; over 70% of them reside in low- and middle-income countries. For the first time the World Health Organization's Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) has sought to determine the status of mHealth in Member States; its 2009 global survey contained a section specifically devoted to mHealth. Completed by 114 Member States, the survey documented for analysis four aspects of mHealth: adoption of initiatives, types of initiatives, status of evaluation, and barriers to implementation. Fourteen categories of mHealth services were surveyed: health call centres, emergency toll-free telephone services, managing emergencies and disasters, mobile telemedicine, appointment reminders, community mobilization and health promotion, treatment compliance, mobile patient records, information access, patient monitoring, health surveys and data collection, surveillance, health awareness raising, and decision support systems.

This edited book explores the use of mobile technologies such as phones, drones, robots, apps, and wearable monitoring devices for improving access to healthcare for socially disadvantaged populations in remote, rural or developing regions. This book brings together examples of large scale, international projects from developing regions of China and Belt and Road countries from researchers in Australia, Bangladesh, Denmark, Norway, Japan, Spain, Thailand and China. The chapters discuss the challenges presented to those seeking to deploy emerging mobile technologies (e.g., smartphones, IoT, drones, robots etc.) for healthcare (mHealth) in developing countries and discuss the solutions undertaken in these case study projects.

Design for Health: Applications of Human Factors delves into critical and emergent issues in healthcare and patient safety and how the field of human factors and ergonomics play a role in this domain. The book uses the Design for X (DfX) methodology to discuss a wide range of contexts, technologies, and population dependent criteria (X’s) that must be considered in the design of a safe and usable healthcare ecosystem. Each chapter discusses a specific topic (e.g., mHealth, medical devices, emergency response, global health, etc.), reviews the concept, and presents a case study that demonstrates how human factors techniques and principles are utilized for the design, evaluation or improvements to specific tools, devices, and technologies (Section 1), healthcare systems and environments (Section 2), and applications to special populations (Section 3). The book represents an essential resource for researchers in academia as well as practitioners in medical device industries, consumer IT, and hospital settings. It covers a range of topics from medication reconciliation to self-care to the artificial heart. Uses the Design for X (DfX) methodology A case study approach provides practical examples for operationalization of key human factors principles and guidelines Provides specific design guidelines for a wide range of topics including resilience, stress and fatigue management, and emerging technologies Examines special populations, such as the elderly and the underserved Brings a multidisciplinary, multi-industry approach to a wide range of healthcare human factors issues

In addition to social media’s prevalence for personal use, online networking tools are also gaining momentum in the healthcare field. Health information and patient discussion are embracing these technologies to create a more ubiquitous communication platform. Social Media and Mobile Technologies for Healthcare provides insight on the tools that are integral to understanding and implementing emerging technologies in health-related fields. With an ever-growing presence of patients and health professionals on social networking sites, this book will provide insight into the effect of communication technologies on health services. This publication is useful for professionals and researchers in health informatics, as well as students, practitioners, clinicians, and academics.