Vol.1 No.4 January 15, 2006
Advanced Mobil Technologies for Health Care Applications

Editorial (pp271-272)
        A. Ganz, R.S.H. Istepanian, and O.K. Tonguz

Research articles:
Design and Implementation of a Mobile Diabetes Management System (pp273-284)
        Y. Zou, R.S.H. Istepanian, X.-H. Wang, and T. Geake
This paper describes a universal Mobile Diabetes Management and Internetworking System - MDMIS. The MDMIS system aims to improve diabetes control by providing a portable, secure and ubiquitous diabetes management service for both diabetics and medical providers.     MDMIS is composed of a medical control centre, patient stations, physician stations, medical administration stations, and system maintenance stations. A patient station collects blood glucose measurements autonomously from a Bluetooth empowered glucose meter and transmits the data to the medical centre via internetworking communications. The medical centre of the system provides powerful services to both patients and physicians, such as updating user information and medication plans, side-effects reporting, blood glucose analysis and alarming, and medicines management. These services can be accessible by patients and physicians through a simple interface from variable devices powered by different operating systems. The security issues of MDMIS are also addressed briefly.

Telemedicine for Disaster Relief: A Novel Architecture (pp285-306)
        S. Olariu, K. Maly, E.C. Foudriat, C.M. Overstreet, S.M. Yamany, and T. Luckenbach
Disaster response and recovery require timely interaction and coordination of public emergency services in order to save lives and property. An important role in this effort must be played by wireless telemedicine whose mandate is to bring to the scene of the disaster the experience and expertise of medical personnel that can direct and supervise paramedics in providing necessary life-support services. The main contribution of this work is to propose Wireless Interactive Remote Medicine – a wireless system architecture support for telemedicine that incorporates leading-edge image compression technology, a robust interactive visualization tool, and a high-performance wireless multimedia network.

System Architecture of WBAN for Ubiquitous Health Monitoring (pp307-326)
        C. Otto, A. Milenkovic, C. Sanders, and E. Jovanov
Recent technological advances in sensors, low-power microelectronics and miniaturization, and wireless networking enabled the design and proliferation of wireless sensor networks capable of autonomously monitoring and controlling environments. One of the most promising applications of sensor networks is for human health monitoring.  A number of tiny wireless sensors, strategically placed on the human body, create a wireless body area network that can monitor various vital signs, providing real-time feedback to the user and medical personnel.  The wireless body area networks promise to revolutionize health monitoring.  However, designers of such systems face a number of challenging tasks, as they need to address often quite conflicting requirements for size, operating time, precision, and reliability.    In this paper we present hardware and software architecture of a working wireless sensor network system for ambulatory health status monitoring. The system consists of multiple sensor nodes that monitor body motion and heart activity, a network coordinator, and a personal server running on a personal digital assistant or a personal computer.

Subjective Quality of Mobile MPEG-4 Videos with Different Frame Rates (pp327-341)
        S. Buchinger and H. Hlavacs 
In this study we investigate the influence of the video frame rate on the subjective quality of digital video. MPEG-4 videos showing content of different type and frame rates, and having a resolution typically used in mobile environments, have been shown to a test audience, which then rated the subjectively perceived quality of the videos. The resulting mean opinion score (MOS) then indicates for given bitrates, which frame rate is optimal for the used videos. We show that in contrast to classical assumptions, the optimal frame rate often is as low as 10 or even 5 frames per second.

On Transport Layer Mechanisms for Real-Time QoS (pp342-363)
        P. Papadimitriou and V. Tsaoussidis
We study transport protocol performance from the perspective of real-time applications. More precisely, we evaluate TCP and UDP supportive role in terms of real-time QoS, network stability and fairness. A new metric for the evaluation of real-time application performance is proposed to capture both bandwidth and delay requirements. Using this metric as a primary criterion in our evaluation analysis, we reach several conclusions on the specific impact of wireless links, real-time traffic friendliness, and UDP/TCP protocol efficiency. Beyond that, we also reach an unexpected result: UDP traffic has occasionally negative impact compared with TCP traffic not only for the systemwide behavior, but also for the supporting application as well.

Authors’ Index of Vol.1 (pp364-364)

Back to JMM Online Front Page