Project View

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Developing e-Health Technologies

Researchers: Dr. X Peng (Aston University); Prof. Y. Peng (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

Sponsor: Royal Academy of Engineering

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has played an important role in helping elderly individuals to improve their quality of life, stay healthier and live independently for longer. The development of high quality and sustainable healthcare systems is a long-term strategy of many countries in the world including the UK and China. The collaborative research intends to jointly apply wireless senor networks and knowledge based technologies to telecare/telehealth systems where healthcare services can be delivered to remote end users with ensured quality and much reduced costs. It also promotes the integration of developments in mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, telecommunications, computing, life sciences and biotechnologies, to address the need for developing advanced technologies used in modern healthcare systems.

The project aims to establish the development strategy that could foster a smart integrated system where wireless sensing technologies and knowledge based engineering are combined to provide healthcare services in a home environment. In the future homecare systems, monitoring and detection units for supporting elderly people to live independently will collect (1) behavioural measurements: such as motion, location, pressure, acoustic, power-on, bed, medication monitoring, and (2) physiological measurements: such as blood pressure, ECG, glucose and weight, pulse oximetry. They will also provide detection of adverse events, such as a fall, and monitor hygiene habits and housekeeping habits. The data collected are normally processed by an expert system to produce the pre-clinic diagnosis. In the currently used expert systems, the sequential design methodology is still the dominant method, so that the quality of design and the time spent on data processing are largely dependent on the experience of clinicians/professionals. In this project, the customer-driven design (case-based design) methodology developed by SJTU was examined to see how the knowledge-base model can be applied in combination with the wireless sensor network developed by Aston to address the real needs of the end users. These needs include providing real-time decision making for daily independent living and healthcare, and adapting to constantly changing user requirements. In such a way, the need for an intervention by clinicians and care professionals will be substantially reduced.

A telecare system

Remote sensing data analysis

Publications:

X.-H. Peng, G.-C. Zhang, X.-Y. Gu, “Cooperative data dissemination for telecare systems via wireless pervasive networking,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Workshop on Ubiquitous Healthcare and Supporting Technologies (Ubi-Health), May 2010.

J. Qi, J. Hu, Y. Peng, W. Wang, Z. Zhan, “AGFSM: A new FSM based on adapted Gaussian membership in case retrieval model for customer-driven design,” Expert Systems with Applications, 38(1), 2011, pp. 894-905.