Market analysis for the next‐generation mobile communications (DMB) service from the perspective of innovation adoption and diffusion

This study examines market acceptance for the satellite digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) service, one of the touted new business models in Korea's next‐generation mobile communications service market, using adoption and diffusion of innovation as the theoretical framework. Market acceptance for the satellite DMB service was assessed by predicting the demand of the service using the Bass model, and the demand variability over time was then analysed by combining the innovation adoption model proposed by Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations (5th edn). The Free Press: New York, 2003). In our estimation of the Bass model, we derived the coefficient of innovation and the coefficient of imitation using actual diffusion data from the mobile telephone service market. We also reorganized the demand data along the diffusion timeline according to Rogers' innovation adoption model, using the responses by survey subjects concerning their respective projected time of adoption. The demand prediction model revealed that diffusion for both took place forming a classical S‐curve. Concerning variability in demand for the satellite DMB service, our findings, much in agreement with Rogers' view, indicated that demand was highly variable over time and depending on the adopter group. This study, as an attempt to measure the market acceptance for the satellite DMB service, a leading next‐generation mobile communications service product, stands out from related studies in that it estimates the nature and level of acceptance for specific customer categories, using theories of innovation adoption and diffusion and survey results conducted through one‐to‐one interviews. The findings and theoretical application procedures provide practical insights into further research on market analysis of new mobile communications service‐related products. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A wearable point-of-care system for home use that incorporates plug-and-play and wireless standards.

A point-of-care system for continuous health monitoring should be wearable, easy to use, and affordable to promote patient independence and facilitate acceptance of new home healthcare technology. Reconfigurability, interoperability, and scalability are important. Standardization supports these requirements, and encourages an open market where lower product prices result from vendor competition. This paper first discusses candidate standards for wireless communication, plug-and-play device interoperability, and medical information exchange in point-of-care systems. It then addresses the design and implementation of a wearable, plug-and-play system for home care which adopts the IEEE 1073 Medical Information Bus (MIB) standards, and uses Bluetooth as the wireless communication protocol. This standards-based system maximizes user mobility by incorporating a three-level architecture populated by base stations, wearable data loggers, and wearable sensors. Design issues include the implementation of the MIB standards on microcontroller-driven embedded devices, low power consumption, wireless data exchange, and data storage and transmission in a reconfigurable body-area network.     

Validating the moderating role of age in multi-perspective acceptance model of wearable healthcare technology

The recent trend of aging population, not to mention the unprecedented pandemic, draws great attention from the general public about health concerns. Since healthcare information technology is different from non-healthcare information technology, additional contexts should be properly incorporated into technology acceptance research to accurately identify influential factors affecting the acceptance of wearable healthcare technology. Thus, we selectively reconfigured factors from health, privacy, and socio-demographic contexts to formulate a health-aware acceptance model. Then, it was empirically analyzed using structural equation modeling. Based on the results, whereas privacy concerns were directly associated with intention to use wearable healthcare technology, health concerns were not. Moreover, age had a moderating effect on social influence and facilitating conditions. These findings suggest valuable insights that the adoption rate of healthcare technology is increased by 1) keeping personal information securely, 2) facilitating social interaction among users, and 3) offering intuitive user experience for elderly people.     

Domain-specific innovativeness and new product adoption: A case of wearable devices

Wearable technology has recently started gaining mass market attention, but the actual adoption of the technology is not up to expectations. The current study examines the effects of consumers’ domain-specific innovativeness (DSI) on the adoption of wearable technology. In this study, consumer DSI is first conceptualized to have two dimensions namely, product-possessing innovativeness (PPI) and information-possessing innovativeness (IPI). The effects of PPI and IPI on perceived attributes of wearable technology (relative advantage, social image, aesthetics, and novelty) are then examined, which influence purchase intention. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on a survey data from young consumers. Structural equation modeling was employed to evaluate the proposed research model. Results demonstrate that 1) the DSI construct must be examined in the two dimensions so that it can properly measure the nature and characteristics of DSI, 2) IPI plays an important role, having a positive effect on all four perceived attributes of IT innovations, 3) PPI has a positive effect on perceived social image and perceived novelty, and finally 4) all perceived attributes of IT innovations have a positive effect on consumers’ purchase intention of wearable devices. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Wearable Biosensors for Body Computing

The challenges of growing and aging populations combined with limited clinical resources have created huge demand for wearable and portable healthcare devices. Research advances in wearable biosensors have made it easier to achieve reliable noninvasive monitoring of health and body status. In this review, recent progress in the development of body computing systems for personalized healthcare is presented, with key considerations and case studies. Critical form factors for wearable sensors, their materials, structures, power sources, modes of data communication, and the types of information they can extract from the body are summarized. Statistically meaningful data analysis considerations, including using cohort and longitudinal correlation studies, are reviewed to understand how raw sensor signals can provide actionable information on the state of the body. This informs discussions on how collected sensor data can be used for personalized and even preventative care, such as by guiding closed-loop medical interventions. Finally, outstanding challenges for making wearable sensor systems reliable, practical, and ubiquitous are considered in order to disrupt traditional medical paradigms with personalized and precision care.     

Cloud support for large scale e-healthcare systems

Rapid development of wearable devices and mobile cloud computing technologies has led to new opportunities for large scale e-healthcare systems. In these systems, individuals’ health information are remotely detected using wearable sensors and forwarded through wireless devices to a dedicated computing system for processing and evaluation where a set of specialists namely, hospitals, healthcare agencies and physicians will take care of such health information. Real-time or semi-real time health information are used for online monitoring of patients at home. This in fact enables the doctors and specialists to provide immediate medical treatments. Large scale e-healthcare systems aim at extending the monitoring coverage from individuals to include a crowd of people who live in communities, cities, or even up to a whole country. In this paper, we propose a large scale e-healthcare monitoring system that targets a crowd of individuals in a wide geographical area. The system is efficiently integrating many emerging technologies such as mobile computing, edge computing, wearable sensors, cloud computing, big data techniques, and decision support systems. It can offer remote monitoring of patients anytime and anywhere in a timely manner. The system also features some unique functions that are of great importance for patients’ health as well as for societies, cities, and countries. These unique features are characterized by taking long-term, proactive, and intelligent decisions for expected risks that might arise by detecting abnormal health patterns shown after analyzing huge amounts of patients’ data. Furthermore, it is using a set of supportive information to enhance the decision support system outcome. A rigorous set of evaluation experiments are conducted and presented to validate the efficiency of the proposed model. The obtained results show that the proposed model is scalable by handling a large number of monitored individuals with minimal overhead. Moreover, exploiting the cloud-based system reduces both the resources consumption and the delay overhead for each individual patient.     

User centric three‐factor authentication protocol for cloud‐assisted wearable devices

Wearable devices, which provide the services of collecting personal data, monitoring health conditions, and so on, are widely used in many fields, ranging from sports to healthcare. Although wearable devices bring convenience to people's lives, they bring about significant security concerns, such as personal privacy disclosure and unauthorized access to wearable devices. To ensure the privacy and security of the sensitive data, it is critical to design an efficient authentication protocol suitable for wearable devices. Recently, Das et al proposed a lightweight authentication protocol, which achieves secure communication between the wearable device and the mobile terminal. However, we find that their protocol is vulnerable to offline password guessing attack and desynchronization attack. Therefore, we put forward a user centric three‐factor authentication scheme for wearable devices assisted by cloud server. Informal security analysis and formal analysis using ProVerif is executed to demonstrate that our protocol not only remedies the flaws of the protocol of Das et al but also meets desired security properties. Comparison with related schemes shows that our protocol satisfies security and usability simultaneously.     

A Secure Crypto Base Authentication and Communication Suite in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for IoT Applications

To monitor the functions of human body and their surroundings Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is used, which are based on low powered and light weight wireless sensors devices. WBAN highly supports numerous applications but this study will focus on the security of ubiquitous healthcare applications. In E-health research monitoring the critical data in terms of security has become a major challenge as WBAN deals with various threats day by day. Therefore the design of secure and reasonably resource optimal algorithms with a robust key generation and management scheme is today’s need. There must be only authorized user’s who can have access to patient related data; otherwise it can be exploited by anyone. This proposed study is aiming to formulate the two security suite for WBAN, which comprises on KBS keys, KAISC and Hash algorithm three improved versions of key management procedures and authentication procedure respectively. Firstly the KBS Keys and improved Hashing suite which is an independent and adaptive key management and authentication scheme for improving the security of WBANs will be used, and secondly KAISC will be used for inter-sensor communication and key management security scheme. All above mentioned procedures will be suitably blend with the encryption and decryption process which will securely send the patient’s critical data to the base station and further to the concerned doctor. The novelty of work is that the proposed methodology is not only simple but also advanced and much secured procedure of key generation and management that will be further validated by the performance analysis. This technique will be beneficial for the continuous monitoring of patient’s critical data in remote areas also.     

A Survey on Wearable Sensor-Based Systems for Health Monitoring and Prognosis

The design and development of wearable biosensor systems for health monitoring has garnered lots of attention in the scientific community and the industry during the last years. Mainly motivated by increasing healthcare costs and propelled by recent technological advances in miniature biosensing devices, smart textiles, microelectronics, and wireless communications, the continuous advance of wearable sensor-based systems will potentially transform the future of healthcare by enabling proactive personal health management and ubiquitous monitoring of a patient's health condition. These systems can comprise various types of small physiological sensors, transmission modules and processing capabilities, and can thus facilitate low-cost wearable unobtrusive solutions for continuous all-day and any-place health, mental and activity status monitoring. This paper attempts to comprehensively review the current research and development on wearable biosensor systems for health monitoring. A variety of system implementations are compared in an approach to identify the technological shortcomings of the current state-of-the-art in wearable biosensor solutions. An emphasis is given to multiparameter physiological sensing system designs, providing reliable vital signs measurements and incorporating real-time decision support for early detection of symptoms or context awareness. In order to evaluate the maturity level of the top current achievements in wearable health-monitoring systems, a set of significant features, that best describe the functionality and the characteristics of the systems, has been selected to derive a thorough study. The aim of this survey is not to criticize, but to serve as a reference for researchers and developers in this scientific area and to provide direction for future research improvements.      

Will smartwatches last? factors contributing to intention to keep using smart wearable technology

This study aims to deepen our understanding of the underlying factors affecting the intention to continue using increasingly popular wearable technology. A new theoretical model is developed and validated to extend traditional technology acceptance theories by identifying several value drivers of the continuous intention and actual usage of wearable devices. Hypotheses were tested using partial least squares path modeling on data collected from 383 actual smartwatch users. The results provide wearable device manufacturers with practical guidance for optimizing competition strategies. They also offer policy-making insights for practitioners to promote better wearable devices on the market, especially during the early stages of adoption.     

Feasibility and performance evaluation of a 6LoWPAN‐enabled platform for ubiquitous healthcare monitoring

Technology has revolutionized medical practices by enabling more convenient and non‐intrusive monitoring of patient's health, leading to next generation ubiquitous healthcare (u‐healthcare). The exploitation of the Internet protocol version 6 addressing space along with the miniaturization of electronic devices has fostered providing interoperability and connectivity of wearable sensor devices in wireless body area networks to the Internet of Things. In this paper, we propose to integrate the IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) to the u‐healthcare monitoring system architecture. The main objective is to study the feasibility of the 6LoWPAN‐enabled platform in real‐world scenarios dealing with medical data. The performance evaluation of this platform is carried out initially through simulations using OMNet++ and then supported by an experimental study using sensor motes and a customized micro‐computing unit. Performance metrics such as throughput, end‐to‐end delay, packet error rate, and energy consumption are investigated under acute health conditions, where patient's health information has to be sent continuously and at maximum rate to the care provider. The obtained results show that the proposed 6LoWPAN solution fulfills the main quality of service requirements of u‐healthcare applications. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Technological aspects of WBANs for health monitoring: a comprehensive review

According to the World Health Organization, most of the world population is affected by chronic diseases, obesity, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes while another dominant problem is of aging population. Thus, it is desirable to have cost effective solutions for health monitoring, especially for countries that have minimum conventionally trained healthcare staff and infrastructure. Healthcare has shifted from hospital dominant services to patient dominant services which has thrived WBANs to provide ubiquitous health monitoring by virtue of wearable or implantable sensor nodes that commonly monitor biological signals. As the society becomes more health conscious, WBANs have the potential to revolutionize the way people integrate their health and information technology. Hence, WBANs are desired to strengthen conventional healthcare systems. Notwithstanding the current achievements, technological advances, proposed solutions and commercialized products; WBANs still experience many obstacles in their foolproof adoption. This paper surveys the plethora of WBAN applications and network architecture in detail used for data collection, data transmission and data analysis that form sensor analyst system in the realm of Internet of Things. Wireless communicational technologies are also discussed in this paper. Also, we have categorized the routing protocols and have provided with their critical qualitative analysis. Towards the end we discuss several projects in the field of WBANs and some open research areas. These findings on how the sensor nodes, newest routing protocols and data analysis techniques influence ubiquitous health monitoring sets this survey apart from the already existing surveys on WBANs.

     

SDN‐based wireless body area network routing algorithm for healthcare architecture

The use of wireless body area networks (WBANs) in healthcare applications has made it convenient to monitor both health personnel and patient status continuously in real time through wearable wireless sensor nodes. However, the heterogeneous and complex network structure of WBANs has some disadvantages in terms of control and management. The software‐defined network (SDN) approach is a promising technology that defines a new design and management approach for network communications. In order to create more flexible and dynamic network structures in WBANs, this study uses the SDN approach. For this, a WBAN architecture based on the SDN approach with a new energy‐aware routing algorithm for healthcare architecture is proposed. To develop a more flexible architecture, a controller that manages all HUBs is designed. The proposed architecture is modeled using the Riverbed Modeler software for performance analysis. The simulation results show that the SDN‐based structure meets the service quality requirements and shows superior performance in terms of energy consumption, throughput, successful transmission rate, and delay parameters according to the traditional routing approach.     

Smart Clothing: Connecting Human with Clouds and Big Data for Sustainable Health Monitoring

Traditional wearable devices have various shortcomings, such as uncomfortableness for long-term wearing, and insufficient accuracy, etc. Thus, health monitoring through traditional wearable devices is hard to be sustainable. In order to obtain healthcare big data by sustainable health monitoring, we design “Smart Clothing”, facilitating unobtrusive collection of various physiological indicators of human body. To provide pervasive intelligence for smart clothing system, mobile healthcare cloud platform is constructed by the use of mobile internet, cloud computing and big data analytics. This paper introduces design details, key technologies and practical implementation methods of smart clothing system. Typical applications powered by smart clothing and big data clouds are presented, such as medical emergency response, emotion care, disease diagnosis, and real-time tactile interaction. Especially, electrocardiograph signals collected by smart clothing are used for mood monitoring and emotion detection. Finally, we highlight some of the design challenges and open issues that still need to be addressed to make smart clothing ubiquitous for a wide range of applications.     

Wearable Self-Powered Electrochemical Devices for Continuous Health Management

The wearable revolution is already present in society through numerous gadgets. However, the contest remains in fully deployable wearable (bio)chemical sensing. Its use is constrained by the energy consumption which is provided by miniaturized batteries, limiting the autonomy of the device. Hence, the combination of materials and engineering efforts to develop sustainable energy management is paramount in the next generation of wearable self-powered electrochemical devices (WeSPEDs). In this direction, this review highlights for the first time the incorporation of innovative energy harvesting technologies with top-notch wearable self-powered sensors and low-powered electrochemical sensors toward battery-free and self-sustainable devices for health and wellbeing management. First, current elements such as wearable designs, electrochemical sensors, energy harvesters and storage, and user interfaces that conform WeSPEDs are depicted. Importantly, the bottlenecks in the development of WeSPEDs from an analytical perspective, product side, and power needs are carefully addressed. Subsequently, energy harvesting opportunities to power wearable electrochemical sensors are discussed. Finally, key findings that will enable the next generation of wearable devices are proposed. Overall, this review aims to bring new strategies for an energy-balanced deployment of WeSPEDs for successful monitoring of (bio)chemical parameters of the body toward personalized, predictive, and importantly, preventive healthcare.     

Absorbability,applicability and availability in nursing and care robots: A thematic analysis of Twitter postings

Nursing and care robots (NCR) have become an important technological innovation in various areas in the medical discipline. Previous studies have found that implementation of robots in healthcare is both associated with positive and negative attitudes. This study aims to improve the understanding of the general public’s communication about nursing and care robots through analyzing the content of posts in social media. An advanced social intelligence platform was used to mine Twitter content. From the platform, data were collected historically. An archival and cross-sectional observational study was conducted online. The data set comprising of 5954 tweets were thematically analyzed. Tweets under the theme of absorbability show that nursing and care robots are considered to be a part of users’ lives, either now or sometime in the future for Twitter users, and the topic is tackled as a fact but with humor, skepticism and enthusiasm. Tweets falling under applicability show that potential nursing and care robots usage covers a range of arenas in everyday life. Results thematized as availability show sincere concern about how the accessibility of nursing and care robots in everyday life will affect costs and other economic aspects, both on a global and an individual level as well as on micro and macro levels of economies. Twitter offers a window into attitudes and ideas as well as fundamental beliefs and practices. Thus, monitoring Twitter discussions on social media can provide valuable insights into current attitudes as well as forecasting coming trends. The data includes information about Twitter users’ anxious relationships with nursing and care robots. We raise important questions about the nature of nursing and care robots and their implementations, both in health care but also in everyday living.     

A type of healthcare system based on intelligent wireless sensor networks

A healthcare system based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is proposed to improve the quality of medical care in hospital or even at home. Structures of the wearable healthcare node, wireless multimedia node as well as the gateway in this system are described in detail. Moreover, a type of localization method for patients and an energy-efficient transmission strategy are put forward as well. Experimental results show that this system performs well on data transmission and information processing.     

Success factors in developing iHeart as a patient-centric healthcare system: A multi-group analysis

Coronary Heart Disease is the number one killer disease not only in Malaysia and Iran but also in many countries around the world. Though early diagnosis is critical for successful treatment of the disease, immediate reaction in cases of emergency is crucial significance in saving the lives of stricken. Previous studies on patient-centric healthcare indicate that both the patient’s whereabouts and the locality of the healthcare centers play a vital role at moment of crisis. Not only it is important for a patient to be able to find the nearest healthcare points, it is also necessary for the emergency centers to know the exact location of the patient seeking for help. To this end, a Location-Based Mobile Cardiac Emergency System (iHeart) is proposed, which is a patient-centric healthcare system, to monitor and track the patient via a wearable device and their mobile phones. Therefore, this study aims to find healthcare professional’s opinion and to find success factors of such a system before its full implementation. A survey was conducted in the form of questionnaire in Malaysia and Iran. In order to conduct the survey, a conceptual model was proposed based on DeLone and McLean Information Success Model. A total number of 323 data was collected from both countries. The results were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with AMOS software. Multi-group comparison was applied to find differences in points of view from both countries. The results of this study revealed the success factors of iHeart before the full implementation. It was found that nationality plays a moderating role between some of the success factors and success of iHeart. The success of a patient-centric healthcare system is bound to the culture of a particular nation as well as to the technological advancements, facilities, and the needs of the target users, meaning that in order for a novel healthcare system to be publicly acknowledged and utilized; target users must be classified and assessed accordingly. The findings of the present study are highly beneficial to both patients suffering from Coronary Heart Disease and the healthcare providers that seek to utilize new patient-centric healthcare systems, devices, and electronic applications to rescue patients.     

可穿戴设备安全威胁与防护措施

随着信息通信技术日新月异地发展,信息通信产品的设备形态和业务功能不断演进,可穿戴设备正在成为信息通信技术的发展热点。一方面,可穿戴设备极大地方便了人们的工作和生活;另一方面,伴随其El益开放的体系架构和不断壮大的业务功能,可穿戴设备同时给人们带来越来越多的安全威胁。本文首先介绍可穿戴设备发展现状,然后分析可穿戴设备面临的安全威胁,继而提出可穿戴设备需要的安全措施,最后展望了可穿戴设备安全的未来发展。     

Integrating a mobile health applications for self-management to enhance Telecare system

A dramatic global increase in the pervasiveness of chronic illness has coincided with a reduction in the availability of healthcare resources, coupled with increased costs for care, forcing a fundamental reevaluation of care processes. These trends have driven interest in the use of advanced healthcare information systems and telematics applications to improve care availability while reducing overall costs, but such measures require taking an integrated approach to a range of interrelated social, economic, political and cultural impacts and challenges. Telecare technologies allow hospitals to continuously monitor biomedical indicators, while providing patients with online services such as clinical appointment scheduling, medical consulting, remote alerts, etc. Telecare has the potential to transform the healthcare industry by reducing costs, increasing quality, and enhancing patient satisfaction. The development of a real-time monitoring healthcare service model through the integration of information and communications technologies (ICT) has emerged as a research priority. This study explores the design, value creation, development and evaluation of Telecare systems and mobile health applications for autonomous health management to ensure appropriate home-based health monitoring and treatment while improving care performance. A well-defined methodology is needed to develop artifacts due to increasing disease complexity. This study develops an Android-based self-management application based on design science research methodology. The App assists users in collecting and monitoring indicators to prompt appropriate care services. This study uses individual home self-care as the basic Telecare unit to design a service model integrating six kinds of healthcare services. Usability testing is conducted to reflect five constructs: system usefulness, ease of learning, information quality, interface quality, and overall satisfaction. Experimental results support previous research findings regarding the Chronic Care Model and enhance the effectiveness of mobile-based services. Our work provides a useful reference to researchers and practitioners interested in understanding how hospitals can better facilitate more effective mobile-based technology adoption in today’s e-health environment.