Mobihealth: Wireless mobile services and applications for healthcare

The MobiHealth IST project aims in the integration of existing and forthcoming technologies in developing and trial new mobile value-added services in the area of healthcare, based on 2.5 (GPRS) and 3G (UMTS) technologies. The target is to develope the means contributing to the reduction of costs in hospitals and health care, by allowing the patients to have complete and personalized monitoring of their health in-home, while pursuing a normal life (instead of being confined in hospital for long periods of monitoring). This will be achieved with the use of a customisable Body Area Network (BAN) integrating the required sensors and actuators, which will continuously monitor the vital signals of the "patient" and relay them to the health center. The complete system will be validated with a series of trials in different European test sites. The MobiHealth trials will implement simple but complete services that can be immediately deployed over the UMTS and GPRS networks. The MobiHealth patient/user will be equipped with different interoperating or independent vital constant sensors, ranging from blood pressure and pulse rate to blood glucose and cholesterol, to electrocardiograms and even brain activity sensors, and from different actuators, such as insulin or morphine pumps, pace maker controllers and even electrical muscle stimulation (Functional Electrical Stimulation or FES). Audio and video I/O devices may also be incorporated in the BAN depending on the needs of the application. The vital constant measurements are sent to a health broker (which may be a hospital or a medical call center) where specialists are able to observe the evolution of the patient and intervene when needed. The communication will be based on 2.5-3G wireless technologies so that the patient/user has complete freedom of movement and can pursue a normal life despite the need for continuous monitoring. Depending on the patient and the treatment, feedback might be sent to the sensors/actuators (for example instructions to increase the sampling frequency, insulin pump control, pace maker tuning etc) or directly to the patient in the form of audible or visual signals. The MobiHealth BAN will handle transmission details and problems such as network disconnection (eg. entering a tunnel) and quality of service adaptation due to hand-over situations.