Wearable PCs for healthcare provision: that's one of the themes presented by KMi PhD student Yanna Vogiazou, who spoke at the International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks held at Imperial College in London on 6th-7th April.
The aim of the workshop was to address general issues related to using wearable/wireless and implantable sensors and to bring together scientists from computing, electronics, bioengineering, medicine and industry in order to discuss the latest technological developments and clinical applications of body-sensor networks. The presentations were very diverse and covered a broad research area , ranging from the use of body sensors for healthcare to large group interactive dance events.
Yanna presented a paper on “Healthcare Compunetics: An End-to-End Architecture for Self-Care Service Provision”, co-authored with Dr. Andy Marsh from Virtual Medical World (VMW) Solutions Ltd and Dr.George Roussos from the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck, University of London. This paper describes the three core elements of the Healthcare Compunetics architecture developed with a view to support the new self-care services: i-notes is a system that extends the electronic patient record to include non-verified data collection by the sensors; i-WAND is a wearable device that offers pluggable body area connectivity, local storage and processing and remote communication to the diagnostic service centre; and the VMW Protocol which allows sensors to communicate effectively with remote healthcare servers. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of evaluation studies currently under plan.
According to Yanna, “The presenation received strong positive feedback and generated a lot of interest among the community.”
Related Links:
- International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks
- Marsh, Roussos, Vogiazou paper on “Healthcare Compunetics: An End-to-End Architecture for Self-Care Service Provision”
