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STH researchers awarded in China

Published Nov 28, 2017

STH researchers Minkeun Ha’s och Thomas Lindh’s solution for management of IoT devices on behalf of caregivers received the Best Paper Award at the 19th IEEE Healthcom conference in October 2017 in Dalian, China.

Internet of Things can be described as the new generation of the Internet. A large amount of wireless devices transmit data on the Internet. In healthcare, a lot of patient data is produced by wearable sensors measuring various functions. There is a need for caregivers to monitor and control the sensor devices, their operation and the services.

– A caregiver has a number of patients, each with one or several wearable sensor devices. A service provider of e.g. wearable ECG services may have a number of caregivers as customers. We have developed a highly distributed model and prototype implementation to manage the sensors and services on behalf of caregivers, says Minkeun Ha, guest researcher from KAIST in South Korea, who together with senior researcher Thomas Lindh at STH has developed the system.

Collects real-time data

The sensors in the system use Bluetooth low energy for the wireless communication. The device management protocol LWM2M is applied between the entities in the system. The patient’s sensors are wirelessly connected to a gateway, e.g. a mobile phone, which communicates with a cloud-based server. The traffic consists of samples from the patient’s sensors and management signals for monitoring and control purposes between the units. The caregiver controls the system from computer client.

– The system collects health data and the caregiver can monitor the patient in realtime or analyze data later. The system could also be connected to emergency systems, says Minkeun Ha.

The system can adapt the sampling frequency, data transmission and local storage to the current quality of the communication channel. If the packet loss ratio is too high, data can be stored locally and transmitted later.

The project has been supported by a sponsorship from Microsoft research to use their Azure IoT Hub. Discussions with the company Kiwok gave good understanding for the requirements from caregivers and service providers.

– To be able to monitor and control performance is very important for healthcare applications, says Thomas Lindh.

– As far as we know, there is no existing tool for caregivers to monitor and control distributed sensors, says Minkeun Ha.

”Best Paper” at the IEEE Healthcom 2017

Recently, the researchers from STH were awarded the Best Paper Award for their paper ”Distributed Performance Management of Internet of Things as a Service for Caregivers” at the IEEE Healthcom conference in Dalian, China. The theme of the conference was ”Improving Lives Through e-Health ICT Solutions”.  

The management system is a prototype implementation and pilot study with wearable ECG sensors as main application. The vision is that the model will be further developed by interested service providers as a product.

Minkeun Ha’s post doc assignment at STH lies within KTH’s agreement with the South Korean university KAIST, which was founded through Rune and Kerstin Jonasson’s donation.

At KAIST, Minkeun Ha has built up an Internet platform for small devices and done research on cloud computing for Internet of Things devices. He hasn’t previously been involved in healthcare applications such as now at STH.

– Most computer scientists want to create practical applications which can be used in the real world. I am excited about producing a solution that can be used not just in research, says Minkeun Ha.

Thomas Lindh is very satisfied with the result of the collaboration.

– Minkeun has definitely made good contributions to our research in the field of medical information and communication systems. We are grateful for the Jonasson foundation sponsorship and appreciate to have Minkeun as a guest researcher, he says.

Sabina Fabrizi

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Last changed: Nov 28, 2017