Vol.2 No.1 March 15, 2006
Editorial (pp001-001)
        D. Taniar                       

Research articles:
GPRS-Based Mobile Telemedicine System (pp002-022)
        B. Woodward, M.F.A. Rasid, L. Gore and P. Atkins
An important emerging issue in mobile telemedicine, or m-Health, is how best to exploit the mobile communications technologies that are now almost globally available.  This paper describes the design of a telemedicine system to transmit a patient’s biomedical signals to a hospital for monitoring or diagnosis, using a Bluetooth-enabled mobile telephone networked to the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS).  The system can transmit from one to eight biomedical signals, typically including the electrocardiogram, blood pressure, temperature and oxygen saturation.  The design of a database server that allows access to the received data by clinicians is also briefly described.  The complete system has been tested successfully using several different data-enabled “smart” mobile telephones running on the Series 60 development platform.  The tests were carried out while stationary and while travelling at high speed in a car.   

Ditis: Virtual Collaborative Teams for Home Healthcare (pp023-036)
        A. Pitsillides, G. Samaras, B. Pitsillides, D. Georgiades, P. Andreou, C. Eleni
This paper presents an e-health mobile application, called DITIS, which supports networked collaboration for home healthcare. The system was originally developed with a view to address the difficulties of continuity of care and communication between the members of a home health care multidisciplinary team. The paper introduces the system DITIS, identifies the needs and challenges of co-ordinated teams of multidisciplinary healthcare professionals and discusses relevant computing models for their implementation. The adopted technology as well as the security needs and a multilayer security framework are briefly described. An evaluation study of the system is also briefly presented.

Information Summarization and Transcoding of Biomedical Resources for Mobile Handheld Devices (pp037-051)
        B. Parmanto, A. Saptono and L. Song
Small screen mobile devices such as PDAs and smart-phones have been popular among healthcare practitioners in the last few years, with a higher penetration rate compared to the general population. The availability of the device allows healthcare practitioners to access online biomedical resources anywhere at anytime. Previous studies have found that the integration of PDAs into clinical practice has lead to the decreased medication error rates and the improvement in physician's adherence to a clinical practice guideline. However, presenting a vast amount of information in the limited space of the PDA display has been the major barrier to the realization of PDA's potential. To overcome the small screen display limitation, we developed a multi-modal transcoder system. The transcoder system adapts information to the limitation of the user's device. Our current project focuses on transcoding full-text biomedical information resources to support mobile devices for healthcare professionals. We developed novel algorithms to understand the structure of biomedical resources through the use of visual template matching and pagelet detection process. The system utilizes simplification and summarization techniques to deliver compact information to the mobile user. A usability study conducted on the system revealed that the simplification and summarization techniques improve the usability of the system.

Non-Invasive Method for Patient-Specific Virtual Heart Based on Fiber-Fluid Model (pp052-080)
        S.Y. Tan, S. Narainasamy, and S. Nagappan
In this paper, we present a non-invasive methodology in constructing a patient-specific virtual human heart based on fiber-fluid model. We applied digital image processing techniques on patient-specific MR images for obtaining the geometry information of human heart. The techniques include: acquisition, image visualization, image enhancement and segmentation. We incorporate cubic Hermite basis functions in our epicardium surface interpolation algorithm. We formularized a three-dimensional rule based fiber reconstruction mechanism to reconstruct the cardiac fiber architecture. A fiber model has been constructed which consists of 1,038 fibers with 371,239 fiber points. This model describes the ventricular three-dimensional geometry. Immersed Boundary Methods is used in constructing fiber-fluid cardiac simulation. The simulation of early ejection (from 0ms to 0.5ms) for the Left Ventricle (LV) has been implemented in SGI workstation. Simulation results for cardiac fiber and blood flow are presented in three-dimensional (3-D). Open GL-based animated visualization programs are developed to serve three purposes: (1) to demonstrate the interpolation and rule-based fiber reconstruction process. (2) To visualize the simulation results of cardiac fiber and blood flow; (3) To analyse the dynamics of the epicardium fibers as well as the blood flow in the cavity of the LV.