J Korean Soc Med Inform.  2009 Dec;15(4):465-474.

Development of u-House Gateway for u-Healthcare

• Ro D
• Yoo S
• Cheon K
• Choi J

Abstract

OBJECTIVE
Ubiquitous healthcare (u-Healthcare) is an emerging paradigm in the healthcare environment. One of the most promising applications for u-Healthcare is the ubiquitous home health monitoring system. This paper addresses two significant challenges in the successful application of the ubiquitous home health monitoring system: the uniform integration of measured biosignal data and easy access to monitored biosignal data. METHODS: We used the Medical waveform description Format Encoding Rule (MFER) standard to encode biosignal data. A web-based MFER upload ActiveX control was designed and implemented to transfer MFER files to the central repository server in a near real-time basis. All of the integrated biosignal data were then accessed and managed through the central repository server. RESULTS: We developed a u-House server that can serve as a uniform data transferer to integrate measured biosignal data from u-House homes into the remote central repository server. We developed user-friendly web services that allow users to easily search and view monitored biosignal data. CONCLUSION: The results of this study suggest that the MFER standard can be easily adapted to u-Healthcare systems and that a web-based ubiquitous home health monitoring system has advantages of ubiquitous access and scalability.

Keyword

Ubiquitous Healthcare; Home Health Monitoring; Biosignal Data; MFER; FLAC

MeSH Terms

Delivery of Health Care

Figure

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  Figure 1 The overall architecture of the u-House system

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  Figure 2 Structure of MFER parser

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  Figure 3 The entity relation diagram of BIRD

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  Figure 4 Screenshot of web-based ECG search interface where the availability of ECG data was indicated by different ECG images in a calendar form

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  Figure 5 The MFER Viewer to display the ECG data in BIRD

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  Figure 6 The web-page of the MFER uploads ActiveX control

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