Intelligent healthcare monitoring
Since each person has unique health behaviour, a certain health status that is dangerous for one may actually be considered safe for someone else. Therefore the HEARTS (Health Early Alarm Recognition and Telemonitoring System) has created a cluster of individually adaptable Tele-Health systems. The ingenuity of these systems stems from their being non-intrusive, dynamic, intelligent, interoperable, based on open architecture and focused on disease prediction. Within the existing framework of telemedicine systems architecture, new technological concepts such as adaptive intelligent components were introduced. One of these included wearable intelligent and non-intrusive sensors. The sensors are able to gather specific biometric signals in addition to non-health related information such as environmental data (temperature, etc) and interconnect them via a wireless network. Additional devices also have the potential to automatically interface each other. One of the applications that has already been realised; it is the eHealth smart card toolkit, which operates within the central management system. It uses a multilevel authentication function based on cryptography via a Security Module (SM) placed in the Reader. Perhaps one of its most appealing features is that it is adaptable to both healthcare professionals as well as to patients. It provides access to decision support systems and access privileges for professionals according to specialty and can be used as an ID for registering in the HEARTS statistics archive. For patients, it can serve as a data carrier with upgradable memory according to medical history, thus having the ability to merge insurance data with medical data. The data are visual such as photo and name as well as numeric such as serial number and PIN. The future of healthcare monitoring may be well on its way to offering the most intelligent cross-sector approach to date. For more information, click at: http://heartsproject.datamat.it/hearts
