SparkMed: a framework for dynamic integration of multimedia medical data into distributed m-Health systems

With the advent of 4G and other long-term evolution (LTE) wireless networks, the traditional boundaries of patient record propagation are diminishing as networking technologies extend the reach of hospital infrastructure and provide on-demand mobile access to medical multimedia data. However, due to legacy and proprietary software, storage and decommissioning costs, and the price of centralization and redevelopment, it remains complex, expensive, and often unfeasible for hospitals to deploy their infrastructure for online and mobile use. This paper proposes the SparkMed data integration framework for mobile healthcare (m-Health), which significantly benefits from the enhanced network capabilities of LTE wireless technologies, by enabling a wide range of heterogeneous medical software and database systems (such as the picture archiving and communication systems, hospital information system, and reporting systems) to be dynamically integrated into a cloud-like peer-to-peer multimedia data store. Our framework allows medical data applications to share data with mobile hosts over a wireless network (such as WiFi and 3G), by binding to existing software systems and deploying them as m-Health applications. SparkMed integrates techniques from multimedia streaming, rich Internet applications (RIA), and remote procedure call (RPC) frameworks to construct a Self-managing, Pervasive Automated netwoRK for Medical Enterprise Data (SparkMed). Further, it is resilient to failure, and able to use mobile and handheld devices to maintain its network, even in the absence of dedicated server devices. We have developed a prototype of the SparkMed framework for evaluation on a radiological workflow simulation, which uses SparkMed to deploy a radiological image viewer as an m-Health application for telemedical use by radiologists and stakeholders. We have evaluated our prototype using ten devices over WiFi and 3G, verifying that our framework meets its two main objectives: 1) interactive delivery of medical multimedia data to mobile devices; and 2) attaching to non-networked medical software processes without significantly impacting their performance. Consistent response times of under 500 ms and graphical frame rates of over 5 frames per second were observed under intended usage conditions. Further, overhead measurements displayed linear scalability and low resource requirements.     

Pervasive, secure access to a hierarchical sensor-based healthcare monitoring architecture in wireless heterogeneous networks

This study presents a healthcare monitoring architecture coupled with wearable sensor systems and an environmental sensor network for monitoring elderly or chronic patients in their residence. The wearable sensor system, built into a fabric belt, consists of various medical sensors that collect a timely set of physiological health indicators transmitted via low energy wireless communication to mobile computing devices. Three application scenarios are implemented using the proposed network architecture. The group-based data collection and data transmission using the ad hoc mode promote outpatient healthcare services for only one medical staff member assigned to a set of patients. Adaptive security issues for data transmission are performed based on different wireless capabilities. This study also presents a monitoring application prototype for capturing sensor data from wireless sensor nodes. The implemented schemes were verified as performing efficiently and rapidly in the proposed network architecture.     

Design and implementation of a wireless sensor network architecture using smart mobile devices

Wireless sensor networks improve the quality of human daily life like ubiquitous city and healthcare services as well as the fundamental monitoring such as environment pollution, tunnel monitoring, earthquake diagnostic, and so on. To increase usability and feasibility of collected sensor data, a wireless sensor network should be required to apply a variety of mobile devices to give the information at anytime and anywhere to users. Thus, we present multi-sensor centric smart sensor network architecture using general mobile devices in order to provide more efficient and valuable sensor network application and services. The proposed system architecture is based on IEEE 802.15.4-2006 standard with smart mobile devices. We also show some scenarios with on-demand request and real time event driven data to show the feasibility of the proposed architecture using five kinds of sensors such as magnetic, photodiode, microphone, motion and vibration. Based on the experiment results, we show that the proposed system has the potential as smart mobile device-based wireless sensor network architecture.     

A network-assisted flow mobility architecture for optimized mobile medical multimedia transmission

A large part of mobile Health (mHealth) use-cases such as remote patient monitoring/diagnosis, teleconsultation, and guided surgical intervention requires advanced and reliable mobile communication solutions to provide efficient multimedia transmission with strict medical level Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) provision. The increasing deployment of overlapping wireless access networks enables the possibility to offer the required network resources for ubiquitous and pervasive mHealth services. To address the challenges and support the above use-cases in today’s heterogeneous network (HetNet) environments, we propose a network-assisted flow-based mobility management architecture for optimized real-time mobile medical multimedia communication. The proposed system is empirically evaluated in a Pan-European HetNet testbed with multi-access Android-based mobile devices. We observed that the proposed scheme significantly improves the objective QoE of simultaneous real-time high-resolution electrocardiography and high-definition ultrasound transmissions while also enhances traffic load balancing capabilities of wireless architectures.     

Querying in Packs: Trustworthy Data Management in Ad Hoc Networks

We describe a trust-based data management framework enabling mobile devices to access the distributed computation, storage, and sensory resources available in pervasive computing environments. Available resources include those in the fixed surrounding infrastructure as well as services offered by other nearby mobile devices. We take a holistic approach that considers data trust, security, and privacy and focus on the collaborative mechanisms providing a trustworthy data management platform in an ad hoc network. The framework is based on a pack formation mechanism that enables collaborative peer interactions using context information and landmarks. A pack provides a routing substrate allowing devices to find reliable information sources and coordinated pro-active and reactive mechanisms to detect and respond to malicious activity. Consequently, a pack forms a foundation for distributed trust management and data intensive interactions. We describe our data management framework with an emphasis on pack formation in mobile ad hoc networks and present preliminary results from simulation experiments.     

Conceptual framework for the security of mobile health applications on Android platform

Mobile Health (mHealth) applications are readily accessible to the average user of mobile devices, and despite the potential of mHealth applications to improve the availability, affordability and effectiveness of delivering healthcare services, they handle sensitive medical data, and as such, have also the potential to carry substantial risks to the security and privacy of their users. Developers of applications are usually unknown, and users are unaware of how their data are being managed and used. This is combined with the emergence of new threats due to the deficiency in mobile applications development or the design ambiguities of the current mobile operating systems. A number of mobile operating systems are available in the market, but the Android platform has gained the topmost popularity. However, Android security model is short of completely ensuring the privacy and security of users’ data, including the data of mHealth applications. Despite the security mechanisms provided by Android such as permissions and sandboxing, mHealth applications are still plagued by serious privacy and security issues. These security issues need to be addressed in order to improve the acceptance of mHealth applications among users and the efficacy of mHealth applications in the healthcare systems. Thus, this paper presents a conceptual framework to improve the security of medical data associated with Android mHealth applications, as well as to protect the privacy of their users. Based on the literature review that suggested the need for the intended security framework, three-distinct and successive phases are presented, each of which is described in a separate section. First, discussed the design process of the first phase to develop a security framework for mHealth apps to ensure the security and privacy of sensitive medical data. The second phase is discussed who to achieve the implementation of a prototypic proof-of-concept version of the framework. Finally, the third phase ending discussed the evaluation process in terms of effectiveness and efficiency for the proposed framework.     

Using PARLAY APIs Over a SIP System in a Distributed Service Platform for Carrier Grade Multimedia Services

The implementation of new mobile communication technologies developed in the third generation partnership project (3GPP) will allow to access the Internet not only from a PC but also via mobile phones, palmtops and other devices. New applications will emerge, combining several basic services like voice telephony, e-mail, voice over IP, mobility or web-browsing, and thus wiping out the borders between the fixed telephone network, mobile radio and the Internet. Offering those value-added services will be the key factor for success of network and service providers in an increasingly competitive market. In 3GPP's service framework the use of the Parlay APIs is proposed that allow application development by third parties in order to speed up service creation and deployment. 3GPP has also adopted SIP for session control of multimedia communications in an IP network. This article proposes a mapping of SIP functionality to Parlay services and describes a prototype implementation using the SIP Servlet API. Furthermore, an architecture of a Service Platform is presented that offers a framework for the creation, execution and management of carrier grade multimedia services in heterogeneous networks.     

OMA DM‐based remote software fault management for mobile devices

Mobile devices (e.g. mobile handsets or PDAs) have gained much functionality and intelligence with the growth of mobile network technologies and the increased use of mobile services. As a consequence, mobile devices have become more complex and many related problems have occurred. Specifically, sudden rebooting and freezing problems caused by software faults decrease the availability of the mobile device and cause inconvenience to end‐users. To solve such problems, academia and industry have focused on Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Device Management (DM); this method is the international de facto standard for mobile device management. In this paper, we propose a software fault management method to remotely determine and correct problems of mobile devices based on OMA DM. We present a definition of management objects and a method to collect them from mobile devices using the OMA DM protocol. We also present a method for debugging and correcting software faults using the collected information. Finally, we present a prototype implementation and performance evaluation to validate our proposed method. Results of the performance evaluation show that our proposed method is efficient and scalable in regard to network traffic overhead and response time. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Novel Untraceable Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol Suitable for Mobile Communication

Communication network has grown to the stage where it becomes ubiquitous. It allows us to access to on-line services at anytime, anywhere and by any devices. This brings out new services, that was previous only accessible via computers, now are available on mobile devices such as e-commerce applications. These applications require mobile users to be authenticated in order to use the services. In this paper, we proposed a novel authenticated key agreement scheme that allows users and servers mutually authenticate each other. Our scheme also conceals users’ identities from adversaries; this is provided in initiator untraceability property of the scheme. Furthermore, the scheme has good computation cost as well as communication and storage costs; thus, the proposed scheme is suitable for the mobile devices.     

Enabling Heterogeneous Mobility in Android Devices

The fast growing of mobile Internet users with the ability of using a wide diversity of access technologies such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX and UMTS/LTE, and the increasing proliferation of mobile devices with heterogeneous network interfaces, require versatile mobility mechanisms providing seamless roaming across those access technologies. Mobility agents such as Mobile IP and Fast MIPv6 are common, however, these solutions still have limitations when dealing with multiple link-layer technologies. In this context, the emerging standard IEEE 802.21 provides a framework which enables mobile agents and network operators to improve the handover process in heterogeneous networks. In this context, this paper presents and discusses the design and implementation of a mobility-aware solution for an Android device, using the IEEE 802.21 framework. A modified Android user terminal is proposed to improve the handover process, assuming a make-before-break approach. Resorting to an experimental testbed, the obtained results show that the proposed solution is an effective contribution to successfully accomplish seamless mobility of Android-based devices operating in 3G and Wi-Fi networks.     

Energy‐aware dynamic task offloading and collective task execution in mobile cloud computing

There is a good opportunity for enlightening the services of the mobile devices by introducing computational offloading using cloud technology. Offloading is a process for managing the complexity of the mobile environment by migrating computational load to the cloud. The mobile devices oblige the quick response for the offloading requests; it is dependent on network connectivity. The cloud services take long set‐up time irrespective of network connectivity. In this paper, new system architecture for the dynamic task offloading in the mobile cloud environment is proposed. The architecture includes the offloading algorithm that concentrates on energy consumption of the tasks both in the local and remote environment. The proposed algorithm formulates a collective task execution model for minimizing the energy consumption. The architecture concentrates on the network model by considering the task completion time in three different network scenarios. The experimental results show the efficiency of the suggested architecture in reducing the energy consumption and completion time of the tasks.     

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.     

Ubiquitous One-Time Password Service Using the Generic Authentication Architecture

The Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA) is a standardised extension to the mobile authentication infrastructure that enables the provision of security services, such as key establishment, to network applications. In this paper we first show how Trusted Computing can be extended in a GAA-like framework to offer new security services. We then propose a general scheme that converts a simple static password authentication mechanism into a one-time password (OTP) system using the GAA key establishment service. The scheme employs a GAA-enabled user device and a GAA-aware server. Most importantly, unlike most OTP systems using a dedicated key-bearing token, the user device does not need to be user or server specific, and can be used in the protocol with no registration or configuration (except for the installation of the necessary application software). We also give two practical instantiations of the general scheme, building firstly on the mobile authentication infrastructure and secondly on Trusted Computing. The practical systems are secure, scalable, fit well to the multi-institution scenario, and enable the provision of ubiquitous and on-demand OTP services.     

EMUNE: Architecture for Mobile Data Transfer Scheduling with Network Availability Predictions

With the mobile communication market increasingly moving towards value-added services, the network cost will need to be included in the service offering itself. This will lead service providers to optimize network usage based on real cost rather than simplified network plans sold to consumers traditionally. Meanwhile, today’s mobile devices are increasingly containing multiple radios, enabling users on the move to take advantage of the heterogeneous wireless network environment. In addition, we observe that many bandwidth intensive services such as video on demand and software updates are essentially non real-time and buffers in mobile devices are effectively unlimited. We therefore propose EMUNE, a new transfer service which leverages these aspects. It supports opportunistic bulk transfers in high bandwidth networks while adapting to device power concerns, application requirements and user preferences of cost and quality. Our proposed architecture consists of an API, a transport service and two main functional units. The well defined API hides all internal complexities from a programmer and provides easy access to the functionalities. The prediction engine infers future network and bandwidth availability. The scheduling engine takes the output of the prediction engine as well as the power and monetary costs, application requirements and user preferences into account and determines which interface to use, when and for how long for all outstanding data transfer requests. The transport service accordingly executes the inferred data transfer schedule. The results from the implementation of EMUNE’s and of the prediction and scheduling engines evaluated against real user data show the effectiveness of the proposed architecture for better utilization of multiple network interfaces in mobile devices.     

Using trusted computing for privacy preserving keystroke-based authentication in smartphones

Smartphones are increasingly being used to store personal information as well as to access sensitive data from the Internet and the cloud. Establishment of the identity of a user requesting information from smartphones is a prerequisite for secure systems in such scenarios. In the past, keystroke-based user identification has been successfully deployed on production-level mobile devices to mitigate the risks associated with naïve username/password based authentication. However, these approaches have two major limitations: they are not applicable to services where authentication occurs outside the domain of the mobile device—such as web-based services; and they often overly tax the limited computational capabilities of mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a protocol for keystroke dynamics analysis which allows web-based applications to make use of remote attestation and delegated keystroke analysis. The end result is an efficient keystroke-based user identification mechanism that strengthens traditional password protected services while mitigating the risks of user profiling by collaborating malicious web services. We present a prototype implementation of our protocol using the popular Android operating system for smartphones.     

Security-Enhanced OSGi Service Environments

Today's home and local-area network environments consist of various types of personal equipments, network devices, and corresponding services. Since such prevalent home network environments frequently deal with private and sensitive information, it is crucial to legitimately provide access control for protecting such emerging environments. As a result, the open services gateway initiative (OSGi) attempted to address this critical issue. However, the current OSGi authorization mechanism is not rigorous enough to fulfill security requirements involved in dynamic OSGi environments. In this paper, we provide a systematic way to adopt a role-based access control (RBAC) approach in OSGi environments. We demonstrate how our authorization framework can achieve important RBAC features and enhance existing primitive access control modules in OSGi service environments. Also, we describe a proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed framework to discuss the feasibility of our approach using an open source implementation of OSGi framework known as Knopflerfish.      

Telemedicine system using computed tomography van of high-speedtelecommunication vehicle

The current medical system provides medical services to patients who visit hospitals. However, medical services can be provided at or close to the home of the patient using fully-equipped mobile telemedicine systems. Such a system can identify diseases at an early stage, improve the patient's quality of life and prognosis through early diagnosis and treatment, and reduce the cost of the medical service. Furthermore, the unit can provide mass screenings of the population, as well as a full medical service to remote areas. The Telecommunications Advanced Organization of Japan and Shinshu University Hospital established a research center for a unique telemedicine project using a mobile system. The mobile unit consists of a van that houses a spiral computed tomography (CT) machine and various telecommunications equipment. The unit allows medical examinations, CT scanning, and online two-way transfer of image data/teleconferencing to a medical center for consultation with various specialists. We have used the system thus far for the early detection of lung cancer through mass screenings over a four-year period in 29 administrative districts. Mass screenings of 19,117 residents resulted in the identification of 75 cases of early lung cancer in patients who were later treated by partial pneumonectomy. We have also used the system to provide medical services and telemedicine support to remote areas, winter-time telemedicine support to an international sports competition, and various medical services to a home-care facility     

Joint source coding and data rate adaptation for energy efficient wireless video streaming

Rapid growth in wireless networks is fueling demand for video services from mobile users. While the problem of transmitting video over unreliable channels has received some attention, the wireless network environment poses challenges such as transmission power management that have received little attention previously in connection with video. Transmission power management affects battery life in mobile devices, interference to other users, and network capacity. We consider energy efficient transmission of a video sequence under delay and quality constraints. The selection of source coding parameters is considered jointly with transmitter power and rate adaptation, and packet transmission scheduling. The goal is to transmit a video frame using the minimal required transmission energy under delay and quality constraints. Experimental results are presented that illustrate the advantages of the proposed approach.     

The Phoenix framework: a practical architecture for programmablenetworks

Programmable networks allow third parties to dynamically reprogram switches and routers in order to extend their functionality. This approach facilitates new capabilities such as dynamic reallocation of resources, automated healing from malfunctions and failures, customized information processing, and easier service creation. These capabilities enable rapid customization of the network by providing mechanisms to adapt to new applications such as multimedia, multicast, intrusion detection, and intranet firewalls. We describe Intel's framework for programmable networks, known as Phoenix. The objective of the Phoenix framework is to make it easier to deploy new network services that leverage the emerging trend toward use of reprogrammable network processors. To accomplish this goal the Phoenix framework defines an extensible mobile agent system and a set of device functionality abstractions for utilizing and extending network capabilities. We also discuss how the open interfaces provided by the Phoenix framework can be utilized to deploy new network services