- A Grid Enabled Framework for Ubiquitous Healthcare Service Provisioning. - These challenges are particularly conspicuous in developing countries and rural world, making the realization of the health related Millennium Development Goals (MDG) a mirage. - Even in the developed world where there are claims of highly skilled expertise and accessibility to sophisticated healthcare resources, there is still the problem of aging population in this part of the world. - services and misuse of healthcare resources is also a challenge in many parts of the world. - Section 3 discusses the state of the art in telemedicine technology. - Section 4 discusses the state of the art in grid computing in healthcare. - Section 5 presents our grid enabled framework for ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning. - Section 7 gives conclusion of the chapter and discusses our future work.. - Telemedicine technology – state of the art. - Telemedicine is the science and art of the maintenance of health, prevention, alleviation, rehabilitation and cure of diseases in patients using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) (Van Beijnum et al., 2009). - But, they are still faced with the problems of high costs of Reduced Instructions Set Computer (RISC) platforms upon which they are based, lack of reference standards and non-interoperability of the systems (Riva &. - Virtual Community (VC) based solutions to healthcare system allow for the building of shared communities, networks and organizations contexts of understanding and knowledge where the real-world knowledge affects the virtual interaction that modifies real-world therapies (Scarlet et al., 2007). - A VC is a group of people who gather because of a common interest such as healthcare service provisioning and whose members interact independent of time and space using ICT as a platform (Leimeister et al., 2002). - Scarlet et al. - Structural property of the community where the interaction happens, whether the community members interact in a physical location or the interaction is mediated by technologies whilst in different geographical locations.. - van Beijnum et al., 2009. - The important properties of a MVC that differentiate it from a VC are discussed as follows (Van Beijnum et al., 2009). - Van Beijnum et al., 2009):. - The driving force behind the Akogrimo project is to merge large scale properties of telecommunication platforms and their support for multimedia applications with the cross-organization collaboration concepts of service- oriented Grids into a coherent and integrated service platform (Jähnert, et al., 2010).. - The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) (Van Dam, et al., 2001. - Latre, et al., 2010) is an emerging wireless sensor networks telemedicine facility that uses intranet, internet or satellite communication for remote patient vital signs monitoring. - However, performance, reliability and security of WBAN based healthcare applications have been investigated (Ylisaukko-oja et al., 2004. - Li et al., 2008;. - Chavez-Santiago et al., 2009. - They are therefore, not suitable for novel applications such as wireless medical imaging (Chavez-Santiago et al., 2009).. - The Ultra WideBand (UWB) (Ryckaert et al., 2005) transmitter with low power consumption and low complexity was proposed to be used in the WBAN context. - Chavez-Santiago et al.. - (2009) also proposed UWB for wireless interface between sensors and a PS because of the several advantages of the wireless technology. - This therefore, rescinds the need for health data encryption that results in lower complexity of the electronics and smaller size of the devices.. - A novel Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) estimator algorithm was designed for quality control in UWB communication (Barrera et al., 2010).. - Grid Computing in healthcare – state of the art. - The real and specific problem that underlies grid concept is coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual communities (Foster et al., 2001).. - Moreover, as demonstrated by Shaikh, et al. - Examples of application demonstrations of the usefulness of grid computing to healthcare include Bioprofiling over the grid for healthcare in which BIOPATTERN grid was developed for Biopattern analysis and Bioprofiling to support individualization of healthcare (Sun et al., 2006). - The distributed mammography data retrieval and processing (MammoGrid) (Amendolia et al., 2005), the eDiaMoND (Lioyd et al., 2005) and the multi-centre neuro-imaging (BIRN) (Grethe et al., 2005) are also examples of useful applications of grid computing to healthcare.. - Additionally, the Intensive Care Grid (ICGrid) (Gjermundrod et al., 2007) is a novel system framework based on the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) to enable the seamless integration, correlation and retrieval of clinical interesting episodes across Intensive Care Unit (ICUs). - The ICGrid allows doctors to utilize the EGEE grid infrastructure through simple intuitive user interfaces, while the infrastructure itself handles the complex task of information replication, fault tolerance and sharing (Gjermundrod et al., 2007). - The CardioGrid (Risk et al., 2009) is a grid based framework for analyzing cardiological signals.. - The WISDOM initiative demonstrated an efficient process of drug discovery by speeding up the entire process and reducing the cost to develop new drugs to treat diseases such as malaria (Jacq et al., 2006).. - 4.1 Grid computing technology. - A grid is a flexible distributed information technology environment that enables multiple services to be created with a significant degree of independence from the specific attributes of underlying support infrastructure (Travostino et al., 2006). - Berman et al., 2003).. - 4.2 Wireless Grid Computing. - Four categories of wireless grids are (Li et al., 2009. - This type of grids allows devices to connect to the internet, support P2P network connection, take advantage of the resources of wired grid networks and make their own resources available to the wired grids.. - Some of the. - 4.3 Utility Grid Computing. - Moreover, consumers of electrical power do not need to worry about the complicated intricacies of the electrical transformers and the peak load management that occurs through the power generation, transmission and distribution grids. - 4.4 Wireless Utility Grid Computing. - Examples of such projects include DataGrid (Breton et al., 2003), e-Diamond (Brady et al., 2003), NeuroGrid (Geddes et al., 2005) and MEDIGrid (Boccia et al., 2005).. - Grid service discovery is one of the most important functionalities expected from the Healthgrid and it generally represents an interesting problem in grid research. - Grid service discovery is the task of matching a query for services described in terms of the required characteristics to a set of services that meet the expressed requirements (Kaur &. - Grid service discovery is a kind of Constraint Satisfiability Problem (CSP) (Yokoo et al., 1998), complicated by the dynamic changes in service information. - Grid enabled healthcare service provisioning. - A Grid enabled Framework (gFrame) is proposed for ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning. - The goal of gFrame is to integrate MDVC of healthcare service providers, individuals, personal space and smart space into Healthgrid for the purpose of enabling ubiquitous, quality and cost-effective healthcare service provisioning, thereby surmounting the challenges of the conventional healthcare system. - Zhang et al. - The healthcare services to be provided within a VC and on the Healthgrid have been discussed (van Beijnum et al., 2009. - van’t Klooster et al., 2010) and these services were categorized into management-level and operational-level services (Naseer &. - The ongoing debate amongst members of the grid community is whether mobile devices should be considered as clients into the grid that is originally meant for high performance computing.. - This argument is anchored on the lucidity of considering resource-constrained devices on the grid, especially when only a small fraction of internet-connected desktop computers contribute to the grid (Phan et al., 2002).. - However, the fact that mobile devices represent a large percentage of the world computing power is sufficient for it to be leveraged for finding more ways to harness the enormous potentials. - The proxy-based system provides an efficient way to integrate virtual communities into grids, instead of direct connectivity that does not solve many of the logjams of constrained devices. - This section describes gFrame, which improves on our previous grid based Healthcare Service Broker (HSB) for remote vital signs management (Olugbara et al., 2007a, Olugbara et al., 2007b). - This new framework extends HSB architecture to MDVC and it supports context awareness and personalized grid service discovery based on UDDI Technical Metadata (UDDI-M T ) (Miles et al., 2003). - Platform Description Problems Addressed Proxy-based clustered architecture (Phan et al., 2002) creates. - iMobile EE (Chen et al., 2003) is an enterprise mobile service platform that provides a scalable, secure and modular software platform, which makes enterprise services easily accessible to a growing list of mobile devices.. - Nomadic service provisioning.. - The smart space allows individual members of the MDVC to access community and Healthgrid services. - The service proxy publishes certain frequently demanded grid services into the LSR to improve the efficacy of the service discovery algorithm. - A Fuzzy logic system is proposed for the implementation of the context engine to be enriched with intelligence and explanation capabilities as well as ability to properly describe human reasoning. - This enables the context engine to be able to provide an explanatory service for every decision taking on behalf of the service requester.. - Power consumption problem is mitigated as much function will be performed by the proxies (service proxy and Globus system) on behalf of the service requesters.. - The purpose is to obtain a usable implementation of the framework through cross comparison with some existing ubiquitous healthcare system frameworks. - Help developers to become aware of strong and weak points of the system and ensure that the right business system is being developed.. - Help stakeholders to get a uniform view of the system, support appropriate view of various stakeholders and to capture and protect intellectual property.. - Increase the knowledge of developers, generate better systems and reveal hidden properties of the systems through evaluation results.. - Improve comparability across research efforts and give a clearer picture of the final system to implement.. - Enable the development of a more comprehensive structure and avoid overlooking of the ambivalent areas of system requirements.. - However, the ubiquitous computing environment has more stringent and constrained usability requirements that make most of the evaluation techniques less effective. - Invisibility concerns the integration of the system into user environment to support the individual users. - Value (A1) Perceived costs and benefits of the system.. - Intelligibility (I1) User understanding of the system explanation.. - The purpose of the evaluation is to compare our gFrame with some existing ubiquitous healthcare system frameworks to determine its strengths and weaknesses. - Figure 2 shows the mapping of the vehicle metrics onto the tenor metrics by associating their corresponding conceptual measures, making the tenor metrics a concrete choice for the evaluation.. - The mapping of the vehicle metrics onto the tenor metrics is described as follows. - These metrics can guarantee that services are of high quality when the infrastructure supporting healthcare services can enable secure and ubiquitous discovery of personalized services, thereby satisfying the quality requirement of the tenor metrics. - Cost reduction is measured in terms of the vehicle metrics, value, cost and availability. - To evaluate our gFrame for its effectiveness in addressing the challenges of the conventional healthcare system it is compared with three other frameworks based on the tenor metrics.. - These frameworks are OnkoNet (Kirn, 2002), Ubiquitous Healthcare System (UHS) (Jung et al., 2008) and Secure Ubiquitous Healthcare System Architecture (SUHSA) (Nikolidakis et al., 2010).. - It can also be observed that OnkoNet seems to address the cost reduction challenge and SUHSA addresses the quality service challenge of the conventional healthcare system. - Our current approach to address the challenges of the conventional healthcare system builds on innovative exploitation of the emerging technologies to realize a grid enabled framework for ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning. - Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Antennas and Propagation. - In Grid Computing:. - The anatomy of the grid: enabling scalable virtual organizations. - 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