A Telehealthcare System with Real-Time Health Information and Diagnosis Assistant
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Su, Mei-Ju
Abstract
By the end of 2006, the number of senior citizens in Taiwan had already exceeded 10% of the entire population and reaching the level of the "aging society". Chronic diseases and complications, mental and physical handicaps, and terminal illnesses of elderly people have also created a huge medical need. These are all becoming heavy burdens of the society. In view of this, we have developed a Real-Time health information and Diagnosis Assistance System for Telehealthcare, which combines a radio communication network, biomedical sensors, and a medical information system to address the needs for emergency care, long term care, and preventive care.
First, we propose a modular Telehealthcare framework that supports function reuse, component reuse, and module reuse. We define each sub-system clearly during the design of a Telehealthcare system. Through the import of Web Service technology and XML (Extensible Markup Language), we can integrate heterogeneous information systems into a framework and accelerate the establishment of our Telehealthcare system.
For emergency care, our proposed Mobile Hospital Emergency Medical System (MHEMS) combines Tele-ultrasound and Focused Assessment with Sonography for Trauma (FAST) to provide pre-diagnosis and diagnosis assistance and ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) of Ambulance, which cannot be done with current emergency care technology. With MHEMS, when patients are carried into the ambulance, the emergency medical technician can ask a doctor to make proper diagnosis for subsequent medical preparation, operations and/or sickbed assignment.
Moreover, to improve the inconvenience of carrying paper patient records when a visiting nurse makes a visiting, we provide a home care record system integrated with portable bio-measurements as a Nurse’s e-Bag. Also, to let the patients record their health records, a tele-homecare system is installed at their home. Therefore, the visiting nurse can make healthcare service and obtain tele-consultation via such system. Based on the system that we provide, morbidity and medicine cost will be reduced.
For preventive care, we have run a clinical trial for a Pilot Study on Community-Based Ubiquitous Healthcare for Current and Retired University Employees. Equipped with information and communications technologies, the system provides to the general public a different healthcare customized by changing the concept from receiving a medical staff’s service only in hospital to obtaining a medical group’s identical daily service outside a hospital, and without doctors or nurses around.
The core technology of this Dissertation is to propose a systematic framework and functional units for Telehealthcare, then to develop a Telehealthcare system supporting emergency care, long-term care, and preventive care. The system framework complies with the standard embedded system and information system, and can be extended to include preventive healthcare, subacute care, acute care, long-term healthcare, and terminal healthcare.
In the future, hardware/software co-design or VLSI chip design can also be adopted to improve the detection and feedback of physiological signals, system data transmission, conversion, and reception rate, so as to meet the needs of different medical departments, and facilitate a quicker integration and development of future healthcare systems.
Subjects
telehealthcare
real-time health information
healthcare
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-99-D93943003-1.pdf
Size
23.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):3b2a3b4343bd9d9223a030b632358269