This book provides a pioneering approach to modeling the human diabetic patient using a software agent. It is based on two MASc (Master of Applied Science) theses: one looking at the evolution of the patient agent in time, and another looking the interaction of the patient agent with the healthcare system. It shows that the software agent evolves in a manner analogous to the human patient and exhibits typical attributes of the illness such as reacting to food consumption, medications, and activity. This agent model can be used in a number of different ways, including as a prototype for a specific human patient with the purpose of helping to identify when that patient's condition deviates from normal variations. The software agent can also be used to study the interaction between the human patient and the health care system. This book is of interest to anyone involved in the management of diabetic patients or in societal research into the management of diabetes. The diabetic patient agent was developed using the Ackerman model for diabetes, but this model can be easily adapted for any other model subject with the necessary physiological data to support that model.

This unifying volume offers a clear theoretical framework for the research shaping the emerging direction of informatics in health care. Contributors ground the reader in the basics of informatics methodology and design, including creating salient research questions, and explore the human dimensions of informatics in studies detailing how patients perceive, respond to, and use health data. Real-world examples bridge the theoretical and the practical as knowledge management-based solutions are applied to pervasive issues in information technologies and service delivery. Together, these articles illustrate the scope of health possibilities for informatics, from patient care management to hospital administration, from improving patient satisfaction to expanding the parameters of practice. Highlights of the coverage:* Design science research opportunities in health care * IS/IT governance in health care: an integrative model * Persuasive technologies and behavior modification through technology: design of a mobile application for behavior change * The development of a hospital secure messaging and communication platform: a conceptualization * The development of intelligent patient-centric systems for health care * An investigation on integrating Eastern and Western medicine with informatics Interest in Theories to Inform Superior Health Informatics Research and Practice cuts across academia and the healthcare industry. Its audience includes healthcare professionals, physicians and other clinicians, practicing informaticians, hospital administrators, IT departments, managers, and management consultants, as well as scholars, researchers, and students in health informatics and public health.

This book presents an advanced systematic mapping review (SMR) and state-of-the-art taxonomy of emergency departments (EDs). Focusing on the patients' level of fulfilment and how it can be enhanced, it examines existing problems like waiting periods and overcrowding and how these can be alleviated to provide a better service. The author examined research papers from 1964 to 2018, and developed six research questions, organising them using mapping studies, the primary objectives of which were firstly, to obtain a common understanding of the problems that need to be highlighted in EDs, and secondly, to re-analyse the methods used. Focusing on quality, the book encourages citations of experimental methods from important studies concerning EDs that can improve services. Through different research papers, various thematic areas in the healthcare sector were examined, like the determination of the relative efficiency of pre-discharge interventions; the analysis of care and managing common indications during the last stages of life; using e-Health to enhance effectiveness and proficiency; the seriousness of patient differences among EDs; the identification of quality problems in healthcare contexts; existing opportunities and the suggested plans. The book concludes that an analytical decision-making process should be used to assess a health technology on the basis of its performance. It stresses the importance of updating this analytical system frequently.

The popularization of the Internet, due in larger part to the advent of multifunctional cell phones, poses new challenges for health professionals, patients, and caregivers as well as creates new possibilities for all of us. This comprehensive volume analyzes how this social phenomenon is transforming long-established healthcare practices and perceptions in a country with one of the highest numbers of Internet users: Brazil. After an opening text that analyzes the Internet and E-Health Care as a field of study, the book comprises six parts. The first part introduces the emergence and development of the internet in Brazil, its pioneering experience in internet governance, digital inclusion, and online citizen participation. The second part is dedicated to internet health audiences by analyzing the cases of patients, the young, and the elderly seeking and sharing health information online, especially in virtual communities. The third part is dedicated to the challenges that the expansion of the internet in healthcare poses to all of us, such as the evaluation of the quality of health information available online and the prevention of the risks involved with online sales, cyberbullying, and consumption of prescription medicines. The fourth presents some innovative e-learning experiences carried out with different groups in Brazil, while the fifth part analyses some practical applications involving the Internet and health, including studies on M-Health, the Internet of things, serious games and the use of new information and communication technologies in health promotion. The last chapter analyses the future of healthcare in the Internet Age. The authors establish a critical and creative debate with international scholarship on the subject. This book is written in a direct and comprehensible way for professionals, researchers, students of communication and health, as well as for stakeholders and others interested in better understanding the trends and the different challenges related to the social phenomenon of the internet in health.

This book is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary resource for the latest information on implantable medical devices, and is intended for graduate students studying electrical engineering, electronic instrumentation, and biomedical engineering. It is also appropriate for academic researchers, professional engineers, practicing doctors, and paramedical staff. Divided into two sections on Basic Concepts and Principles, and Applications, the first section provides an all-embracing perspective of the electronics background necessary for this work. The second section deals with pacing techniques used for the heart, brain, spinal cord, and the network of nerves that interlink the brain and spinal cord with the major organs, including ear and eye prostheses. The four main offshoots of implantable electronics, which this book discusses, are: The insertion of an implantable neural amplifier for accurate recording of neural signals for neuroengineering studies The use of implantable pulse generators for pacing the activities of diseased organs The use of implantable sensors for observing the influence of therapy and monitoring a patient's biological parameters The use of drug delivery systems to supervise the supply of accurate doses of medicine to affected parts Readers will also find chapters on the essentials of clocking and timing circuits, pulse generator circuits, neural amplifiers, batteries, biomaterials and biocompatibility, and more. Unique to this book is also a chapter on cyber security and confidentiality concerns with implants. End-of-chapter questions and exercises help readers apply the content to practical use, making this an ideal book for anyone wishing to learn more about implantable devices.

This book highlights the issues and challenges in personalised healthcare systems. The individual chapters address different aspects of such systems, including the novel Internet of Things (IoT) system architectures in healthcare and emerging e-health based IoT applications. Moreover, the book investigates the impact of cutting-edge innovations on the IoT.

Engineering Innovation is an overview of the interconnected business and product development techniques needed to nurture the development of raw, emerging technologies into commercially viable products. This book relates Funding Strategies, Business Development, and Product Development to one another as an idea is refined to a validated concept, iteratively developed into a product, then produced for commercialization. Engineering Innovation also provides an introduction to business strategies and manufacturing techniques on a technical level designed to encourage passionate clinicians, academics, engineers and savvy entrepreneurs. Offers a comprehensive overview of the process of bringing new technology to market. Identifies a variety of technology management skill sets and management tools. Explores concept generation in conjunction with intellectual property development for early-stage companies. Explores Quality and Transfer-to-Manufacturing.

The promise and prospects for mobile technologies in healthcare service delivery-particularly as experienced by patients and other users-are the focus of this forward-looking volume. Its detailed sociotechnical perspective takes in factors influencing patient and provider adoption of technological advances, in addition to the well-known cost and accessibility advantages. Enlightening reports show mobile health technologies in multiple contexts as an impetus for behavioral change, a means of monitoring health changes, a growing trend in service delivery, and an emerging health frontier worldwide. Together, these chapters point to the continued expansion-and global reach-of mobile technology in the next stage of healthcare services. Included in the coverage: Behavior change techniques used in mobile applications targeting physical activity: a systematic review Mobile health integration in pregnancy Unintended users, uses, and consequences of mobile weight loss apps: using eating disorders as a case study Intention vs. perception: understanding the differences in physicians' attitudes towards mobile health applications HealthGuide: a personalized mobile patient guidance system Adoption of sensors in mobile health Current and Emerging mHealth Technologies is salient reading for researchers interested in mobile health development and implementation as well as technology adoption, and mobile health system developers and managers who are interested in the implications of mobile health use by patients and/or healthcare professionals. It can also be used for courses in technology adoption and health technologies.

This book covers the most recent developments in the field of osteochondral tissue engineering (OCTE) and covers in detail the concepts and current challenges for bone and cartilage repair and regeneration. Specific topics include viscosupplementation, biologicals, tissue engineering approaches, in vitro and in vivo models, and technological advances with stem cells, bioreactors, and microfluidics. Osteochondral Tissue Engineering: Challenges, Current Strategies, and Technological Advances presents challenges and strategies in the field of osteochondral regeneration and serves as a core reference for biomedical engineering students and a wide range of established researchers and professionals working in orthopedics.

This book introduces readers to the methods, types of data, and scale of analysis used in the context of health. The challenges of working with big data are explored throughout the book, while the benefits are also emphasized through the discoveries made possible by linking large datasets. Methods include thorough case studies from statistics, as well as the newest facets of data analytics: data visualization, modeling and simulation, and machine learning. The diversity of datasets is illustrated through chapters on networked data, image processing, and text, in addition to typical structured numerical datasets. While the methods, types of data, and scale have been individually covered elsewhere, by bringing them all together under one "umbrella" the book highlights synergies, while also helping scholars fluidly switch between tools as needed. New challenges and emerging frontiers are also discussed, helping scholars grasp how methods will need to change in response to the latest challenges in health.

Worldwide, the population ageing is a reality. The concept of Active Ageing, adopted by the World Health Organization, aims to guarantee quality ageing and appears as a strategy to solve this demographic challenge. The technological solutions might have a key role in the promotion of human functioning and in the mitigation of disabilities, particularly those resulting from the natural ageing process. This perspective is evident in the development of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions. In this context, it is relevant to know about the recent developments in AAL and discuss future trends and challenges in this area. One of the objectives of this book is to do a systematic literature review on AAL, not only considering the technology used, but also the health condition that is intended to improve. For this purpose, we consider the human functioning, in particular the conceptual model of International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). Considering that the ICF conceptual framework is accepted within the healthcare domain, the use of its concepts and terminologies to promote multidisciplinary approaches for AAL solutions development processes can help to overcome difficulties of communication between users, careers and technological developers. AAL solutions must consider in their development the needs of the person that will use AAL solutions. The development must be user-centred and usability questions cannot be forgotten. In addition, the acceptance of the AAL solutions is closely related to the quality of the systems, so it is necessary to appropriately assess these solutions.

This book offers examples of how data science, big data, analytics, and cloud technology can be used in healthcare to significantly improve a hospital's IT Energy Efficiency along with information on the best ways to improve energy efficiency for healthcare in a cost effective manner. The book builds on the work done in other sectors (mainly data centers) in effectively measuring and improving IT energy efficiency and includes case studies illustrating power and cooling requirements within Green Healthcare. Making Healthcare Green will appeal to professionals and researchers working in the areas of analytics and energy efficiency within the healthcare fields.

This book describes the latest advances in pulse signal analysis and their applications in classification and diagnosis. First, it provides a comprehensive introduction to useful techniques for pulse signal acquisition based on different kinds of pulse sensors together with the optimized acquisition scheme. It then presents a number of preprocessing and feature extraction methods, as well as case studies of the classification methods used. Lastly it discusses some promising directions for the future study and clinical applications of pulse signal analysis. The book is a valuable resource for researchers, professionals and postgraduate students working in the field of pulse diagnosis, signal processing, pattern recognition and biometrics. It is also useful for those involved in interdisciplinary research.

Point of care ultrasound is a critical tool required for assessing all patients, providing rapid answers to clinical questions and facilitating high quality care for patients. This essential guide caters for all generalist clinicians beginning their ultrasound journey and extends to more advanced assessments for those with established ultrasound experience wishing to advance their knowledge and skills. It covers a wide range of ultrasound topics from echocardiography, thoracic and COVID-19 to emerging areas such as palliative care, hospital at home and remote and austere medicine. An extensive collection of colour images, videos and examples of clinical applications will inspire readers to acquire the skills of point of care ultrasound quickly, safely and systematically. The printed code on the inside of the cover provides access to an online version on Cambridge Core. An essential aid for acute clinicians, paramedics, general practitioners as well as remote medical providers, medical educators and students.

This book highlights the applications of soft computing techniques in medical bioinformatics. It reflects the state-of-the-art research in soft computing and bioinformatics, including theory, algorithms, numerical simulations, and error and uncertainty analysis. It also deals with novel applications of new processing techniques in computer science. This book is useful to both students and researchers from computer science and engineering fields.

The aim of this book is to present a range of analytical methods that can be used in formulation design and development and focus on how these systems can be applied to understand formulation components and the dosage form these build. To effectively design and exploit drug delivery systems, the underlying characteristic of a dosage form must be understood--from the characteristics of the individual formulation components, to how they act and interact within the formulation, and finally, to how this formulation responds in different biological environments. To achieve this, there is a wide range of analytical techniques that can be adopted to understand and elucidate the mechanics of drug delivery and drug formulation. Such methods include e.g. spectroscopic analysis, diffractometric analysis, thermal investigations, surface analytical techniques, particle size analysis, rheological techniques, methods to characterize drug stability and release, and biological analysis in appropriate cell and animal models. Whilst each of these methods can encompass a full research area in their own right, formulation scientists must be able to effectively apply these methods to the delivery system they are considering. The information in this book is designed to support researchers in their ability to fully characterize and analyze a range of delivery systems, using an appropriate selection of analytical techniques. Due to its consideration of regulatory approval, this book will also be suitable for industrial researchers both at early stage up to pre-clinical research.

This book reviews existing sensor technologies that are now being coupled with computational intelligence for the remote monitoring of physical activity and ex vivo biosignatures. In today's frenetic world, consumers are becoming ever more demanding: they want to control every aspect of their lives and look for options specifically tailored to their individual needs. In many cases, suppliers are catering to these new demands; as a result, clothing, food, social media, fitness and banking services are all being democratised to the individual. Healthcare provision has finally caught up to this trend and is currently being rebooted to offer personalised solutions, while simultaneously creating a more effective, scalable and cost-effective system for all. The desire for personalisation, home monitoring and treatment, and provision of care in remote locations or in emerging and impoverished nations that lack a fixed infrastructure, is leading to the realisation that mobile technology might be the best candidate for achieving these goals. A combination of several technological, healthcare and financial factors are driving this trend to create a new healthcare model that stresses preventative 'health-care' rather than 'sick-care', and a shift from volume to value. Mobile healthcare (mhealth), which could also be termed the "internet of people", refers to the integration of sensors and smartphones to gather and interpret clinical data from patients in real-time. Most importantly, with an ageing population suffering multiple morbidities, mhealth could provide healthcare solutions to enhance chronically ill patients' quality of life.

This handbook brings together a variety of approaches to the uses of big data in multiple fields, primarily science, medicine, and business. This single resource features contributions from researchers around the world from a variety of fields, where they share their findings and experience. This book is intended to help spur further innovation in big data. The research is presented in a way that allows readers, regardless of their field of study, to learn from how applications have proven successful and how similar applications could be used in their own field. Contributions stem from researchers in fields such as physics, biology, energy, healthcare, and business. The contributors also discuss important topics such as fraud detection, privacy implications, legal perspectives, and ethical handling of big data.

The book presents a knowledge discovery based approach to build a recommender system supporting a physician in treating tinnitus patients with the highly successful method called Tinnitus Retraining Therapy. It describes experiments on extracting novel knowledge from the historical dataset of patients treated by Dr. P. Jastreboff so that to better understand factors behind therapy's effectiveness and better personalize treatments for different profiles of patients. The book is a response for a growing demand of an advanced data analytics in the healthcare industry in order to provide better care with the data driven decision-making solutions. The potential economic benefits of applying computerized clinical decision support systems include not only improved efficiency in health care delivery (by reducing costs, improving quality of care and patient safety), but also enhancement in treatment's standardization, objectivity and availability in places of scarce expert's knowledge on this difficult to treat hearing disorder. Furthermore, described approach could be used in assessment of the clinical effectiveness of evidence-based intervention of various proposed treatments for tinnitus.

This book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date treatise of a range of methodological and algorithmic issues. It also discusses implementations and case studies, identifies the best design practices, and assesses data analytics business models and practices in industry, health care, administration and business.Data science and big data go hand in hand and constitute a rapidly growing area of research and have attracted the attention of industry and business alike. The area itself has opened up promising new directions of fundamental and applied research and has led to interesting applications, especially those addressing the immediate need to deal with large repositories of data and building tangible, user-centric models of relationships in data. Data is the lifeblood of today's knowledge-driven economy.Numerous data science models are oriented towards end users and along with the regular requirements for accuracy (which are present in any modeling), come the requirements for ability to process huge and varying data sets as well as robustness, interpretability, and simplicity (transparency). Computational intelligence with its underlying methodologies and tools helps address data analytics needs.The book is of interest to those researchers and practitioners involved in data science, Internet engineering, computational intelligence, management, operations research, and knowledge-based systems.

This clear-sighted volume introduces the concept of "disruptive cooperation"- transformative partnerships between the health and technology sectors to eliminate widespread healthcare problems such as inequities, waste, and inappropriate care. Emphasizing the most pressing issues of a world growing older with long-term chronic illness, it unveils a new framework for personalized, integrative service based in mobile technologies. Coverage analyzes social aspects of illness and health, clinically robust uses of health data, and wireless and wearable applications in intervention, prevention, and health promotion. And case studies from digital health innovators illustrate opportunities for coordinating the service delivery, business, research/science, and policy sectors to promote healthier aging worldwide. Included among the topics: Cooperation in aging services technologies The quantified self, wearables, and the tracking revolution Smart healthy cities: public-private partnerships Beyond silos to data analytics for population health Cooperation for building secure standards for health data Peer-to-peer platforms for physicians in underserved areas: a human rights approach to social media in medicine Disruptive Cooperation in Digital Health will energize digital health and healthcare professionals in both non-profit and for-profit settings. Policymakers and public health professionals with an interest in innovation policy should find it an inspiring ideabook.

This textbook on practical data analytics unites fundamental principles, algorithms, and data. Algorithms are the keystone of data analytics and the focal point of this textbook. Clear and intuitive explanations of the mathematical and statistical foundations make the algorithms transparent. But practical data analytics requires more than just the foundations. Problems and data are enormously variable and only the most elementary of algorithms can be used without modification. Programming fluency and experience with real and challenging data is indispensable and so the reader is immersed in Python and R and real data analysis. By the end of the book, the reader will have gained the ability to adapt algorithms to new problems and carry out innovative analyses. This book has three parts:(a) Data Reduction: Begins with the concepts of data reduction, data maps, and information extraction. The second chapter introduces associative statistics, the mathematical foundation of scalable algorithms and distributed computing. Practical aspects of distributed computing is the subject of the Hadoop and MapReduce chapter.(b) Extracting Information from Data: Linear regression and data visualization are the principal topics of Part II. The authors dedicate a chapter to the critical domain of Healthcare Analytics for an extended example of practical data analytics. The algorithms and analytics will be of much interest to practitioners interested in utilizing the large and unwieldly data sets of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.(c) Predictive Analytics Two foundational and widely used algorithms, k-nearest neighbors and naive Bayes, are developed in detail. A chapter is dedicated to forecasting. The last chapter focuses on streaming data and uses publicly accessible data streams originating from the Twitter API and the NASDAQ stock market in the tutorials. This book is intended for a one- or two-semester course in data analytics for upper-division undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics, statistics, and computer science. The prerequisites are kept low, and students with one or two courses in probability or statistics, an exposure to vectors and matrices, and a programming course will have no difficulty. The core material of every chapter is accessible to all with these prerequisites. The chapters often expand at the close with innovations of interest to practitioners of data science. Each chapter includes exercises of varying levels of difficulty. The text is eminently suitable for self-study and an exceptional resource for practitioners.

This comprehensive book focuses on better big-data security for healthcare organizations. Following an extensive introduction to the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare including challenging topics and scenarios, it offers an in-depth analysis of medical body area networks with the 5th generation of IoT communication technology along with its nanotechnology. It also describes a novel strategic framework and computationally intelligent model to measure possible security vulnerabilities in the context of e-health. Moreover, the book addresses healthcare systems that handle large volumes of data driven by patients' records and health/personal information, including big-data-based knowledge management systems to support clinical decisions. Several of the issues faced in storing/processing big data are presented along with the available tools, technologies and algorithms to deal with those problems as well as a case study in healthcare analytics. Addressing trust, privacy, and security issues as well as the IoT and big-data challenges, the book highlights the advances in the field to guide engineers developing different IoT devices and evaluating the performance of different IoT techniques. Additionally, it explores the impact of such technologies on public, private, community, and hybrid scenarios in healthcare. This book offers professionals, scientists and engineers the latest technologies, techniques, and strategies for IoT and big data.

This extensively revised textbook describes and defines the US healthcare delivery system, its many systemic challenges and the prior efforts to develop and deploy informatics tools to help overcome these problems. Now that electronic health record systems are widely deployed, the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability standard is being rapidly accepted as the means to access and share the data stored in those systems and analytics is increasing being used to gain new knowledge from that aggregated clinical data, this book goes on to discuss health informatics from an historical perspective, its current state and likely future state. It then turns to some of the important and evolving areas of informatics including electronic healt\h records, clinical decision support,. population and public health, mHealth and analytics. Numerous use cases and case studies are employed in all of these discussions to help readers connect the technologies to real world challenges. Health Informatics on FHIR: How HL7's API is Transforming Healthcare is for introductory health informatics courses for health sciences students (e.g., doctors, nurses, PhDs), the current health informatics community, computer science and IT professionals interested in learning about the field and practicing healthcare providers. Though this textbook covers an important new technology, it is accessible to non-technical readers including healthcare providers, their patients or anyone interested in the use of healthcare data for improved care, public/population health or research.