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Caring for patients with chronic illnesses is costly: over a trillion
dollars per year in the United States alone, and this figure is
expected to grow. To address this trend, we have designed and built
a platform, called Personal Care Connect (PCC), to facilitate the
remote monitoring of patients. By providing caregivers with timely
access to a patient's health status, patients can receive appropriate
preventive interventions, thus reducing hospitalization, enhancing
the quality of healthcare and improving patients' quality of life.
PCC is designed to reduce healthcare costs by focusing on preventive
measures and monitoring, instead of on emergency care and hospital
admissions. Although PCC has features in common with other remote
monitoring systems, it stands out as a standards-based open platform,
designed to integrate with devices from diverse manufacturers and
applications from independent software vendors.
For an overview of the design of PCC, please see the "IBM Systems
Journal," vol.46(1), Remote
health-care monitorong using Personal Care Connect and, for
a discussion of a field trial, Monitoring
chronically ill patients using mobile technologies in the same
issue.
The main focus of our work on PCC are the data-collection aspects
of the system. We have created a Java-based module that interfaces
with Bluetooth-enabled
medical devices to gather measurements and manage the resulting
data. Local management typically includes forwarding data to a server,
but may include a local display, audio alerts for unexpected values,
local long-term logging, etc. The data hub is typically a smartphone
with Java MIDP (J2ME CLDC) and the JSR-82 Java Bluetooth interface,
but can also be an OSGi-enabled, J2SE-embedded device with home-broadband
and Bluetooth connections. The reusability of the code-base is why
Java has proved to be such a useful platform for the data-gathering
end of this project.
The Zurich lab is also represented on the new Medical Devices Working
Group of the Bluetooth SIG. This group is developing an industry
standard for medical device communication over Bluetooth, allowing
sensors and computation engines (such as the PCC hub) to interoperate
without the need for custom interfaces to provide compatibility.
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