Progress beyond the state-of-the art
The CHIRON project will provide a number of key results each demonstrating breakthrough innovation in its relevant technological field.
The technological challenges of this new Personal Health System fully integrated into the conventional hospital-based Healthcare System are in the realization of the best synergy among conflicting requirements:
Data gathering and data processing in resource-constrained systems (the wireless mobile sensors network),
- Unobtrusiveness of the monitoring combined with accuracy of the measured data,
- Continuous monitoring vs. unobtrusiveness of the solution and its acceptance by the patients,
- Automation or minimal human intervention vs. the reliability of the feedback,
- Availability of a massive quantity of data vs. the easy and fast interpretation of these data by the medical professional,
- Privacy and security of data vs. easy and ubiquitous access to these data by authorized persons,
The advanced solution proposed by CHIRON represents a solid contribution to solve these issues.
The following table lists the research areas addressed by CHIRON and gives a brief summary on how CHIRON will progress beyond state-of-the art. Full details are described in the paragraphs following the table.
Table : Progress beyond state-of-the art at a glance
|Topic||CHIRON contribution Beyond State-of-the Art|
|New approach in healthcare||
1) multiparametric monitoring
|Network of Smart sensors with measurement accuracy of each indicator enhanced through the comparison with other monitored parameters; realization of an overall embedded system that measures simultaneously a number of simple parameters from easily applicable, low cost sensors, but that taken together form a powerful diagnostic tool.|
|1) Integration of heterogeneous devices / embedded systems||Design of an abstraction layer exposing a generic device profile to the application layer and providing a standard mechanism to access data and services of heterogeneous networked embedded devices independently from the hardware of the nodes and from the specific solution adopted at network and link layers.|
|1) flexibility||Allowing dynamic adaptation, composition and reconfiguration of components; realizing resources optimization and easy extensibility|
|NEW APPROACHES IN THE ELICITATION OF NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS||Extension of ISO 25000 standards to the Personal Healthcare domain and inclusion – in addition of the medical professionals only – of the final users (elderly, patients suffering from chronic diseases) in the elicitation process.|
|SENSOR NODES WITH ENHANCED CAPABILITIES||Distributed processing and distributed data storage at sensor node level; adoption of a heterogeneous energy harvesting system (use of state-of-the art energy harvesting techniques complemented with an effective power management strategy)|
|New methods for the measurement of biological parameters||
|DATA SECURITY AND PRIVACY||Novel solution for enhancing data security and privacy in the Wireless Sensor Network|
|ADVANCED SOLUTIONS FOR THE ANALYSIS AND THE VISUALIZATION OF MEDICAL IMAGES||
The attached file gives more details on the innovative aspects of the CHIRON Project in some of these areas.