Today one of the fast growing social services is the ability for doctors to monitor patients in their residences. The proposed highly scalable database system is designed to support a Remote Patient Monitoring system (RPMS). In an RPMS, a wide range of applications are enabled by collecting health related measurement results from a number of medical devices in the patient’s home, parsing and formatting these results, and transmitting them from the patient’s home to specific data stores. Subsequently, another set of applications will communicate with these data stores to provide clinicians with the ability to observe, examine, and analyze these health related measurements in (near) real-time. Because of the rapid expansion in the number of patients utilizing RPMS, it is becoming a challenge to store, manage, and process the very large number of health related measurements that are being collected. The primary reason for this problem is that most RPMSs are built on top of traditional relational databases, which are inefficient when dealing with this very large amount of data (often called “big data”). This thesis project analyzes scalable data management to support RPMSs, introduces a new set of open-source technologies that efficiently store and manage any amount of data which might be used in conjunction with such a scalable RPMS based upon HBase, implements these technologies, and as a proof of concept, compares the prototype data management system with the performance of a traditional relational database (specifically MySQL). This comparison considers both a single node and a multi node cluster. The comparison evaluates several critical parameters, including performance, scalability, and load balancing (in the case of multiple nodes). The amount of data used for testing input/output (read/write) and data statistics performance is 1, 10, 50, 100, and 250 GB. The thesis presents several ways of dealing with large amounts of data and develops & evaluates a highly scalable database that could be used with a RPMS. Several software suites were used to compare both relational and non-relational systems and these results are used to evaluate the performance of the prototype of the proposed RPMS. The results of benchmarking show that MySQL is better than HBase in terms of read performance, while HBase is better in terms of write performance. Which of these types of databases should be used to implement a RPMS is a function of the expected ratio of reads and writes. Learning this ratio should be the subject of a future thesis project. / En av de snabbast växande sociala tjänsterna idag är möjligheten för läkare att övervaka patienter i sina bostäder. Det beskrivna, mycket skalbara databassystemet är utformat för att stödja ett sådant Remote Patient Monitoring-system (RPMS). I ett RPMS kan flertalet applikationer användas med hälsorelaterade mätresultat från medicintekniska produkter i patientens hem, för att analysera och formatera resultat, samt överföra dem från patientens hem till specifika datalager. Därefter kommer ytterligare en uppsättning program kommunicera med dessa datalager för att ge kliniker möjlighet att observera, undersöka och analysera dessa hälsorelaterade mått i (nära) realtid. På grund av den snabba expansionen av antalet patienter som använder RPMS, är det en utmaning att hantera och bearbeta den stora mängd hälsorelaterade mätningar som samlas in. Den främsta anledningen till detta problem är att de flesta RPMS är inbyggda i traditionella relationsdatabaser, som är ineffektiva när det handlar om väldigt stora mängder data (ofta kallat "big data"). Detta examensarbete analyserar skalbar datahantering för RPMS, och inför en ny uppsättning av teknologier baserade på öppen källkod som effektivt lagrar och hanterar godtyckligt stora datamängder. Dessa tekniker används i en prototypversion (proof of concept) av ett skalbart RPMS baserat på HBase. Implementationen av det designade systemet jämförs mot ett RPMS baserat på en traditionell relationsdatabas (i detta fall MySQL). Denna jämförelse ges för både en ensam nod och flera noder. Jämförelsen utvärderar flera kritiska parametrar, inklusive prestanda, skalbarhet, och lastbalansering (i fallet med flera noder). Datamängderna som används för att testa läsning/skrivning och statistisk prestanda är 1, 10, 50, 100 respektive 250 GB. Avhandlingen presenterar flera sätt att hantera stora mängder data och utvecklar samt utvärderar en mycket skalbar databas, som är lämplig för användning i RPMS. Flera mjukvaror för att jämföra relationella och icke-relationella system används för att utvärdera prototypen av de föreslagna RPMS och dess resultat. Resultaten av dessa jämförelser visar att MySQL presterar bättre än HBase när det gäller läsprestanda, medan HBase har bättre prestanda vid skrivning. Vilken typ av databas som bör väljas vid en RMPS-implementation beror därför på den förväntade kvoten mellan läsningar och skrivningar. Detta förhållande är ett lämpligt ämne för ett framtida examensarbete.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / The Patient Monitoring System is a wireless sensor network application used for dynamically tracking a patient’s physical activity using 3D Accelerometer Sensors in the Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (SPOT) platform. The system is able to detect different postures of a person and recognize high-level actions performed by a patient by monitoring different pattern of postures. This activity can be monitored remotely from a nurse station or a handheld device. The monitoring system can be used for alerting the nurse station in a hospital, if a patient performs some abnormal action. In the proposed system, the Sun SPOTs are affixed on a person's chest, thigh, leg and arm. The application determines the posture of a person by sensing the acceleration and tilt values of the SPOT in the direction of X, Y and Z axis. Based on these values the application can determine the postures of a person such as Lying Down, Sitting, Standing, Walking, Bending, and Arm Moving. We provide user mechanisms to define high level actions such as “attempting to get up from Lying Down position”, in terms of patterns of lower-level posture sequences. The system detects these patterns from the posture sequences reported by the Sun SPOTs, and reports them at desired locations.

Master of Science / Department of Computer Science / Daniel A. Andresen / With an improvement in technology and miniaturization of sensors, there have been attempts to utilize the new technology in various areas to improve the quality of human life. One main area of research that has seen an adoption of the technology is the healthcare sector. The people in need of healthcare services find it very expensive this is particularly true in developing countries. As a result, this project is an attempt to solve a healthcare problem currently society is facing. The main objective of the project was to design a remote healthcare system. It’s comprised of three main parts. The first part being, detection of patient’s vitals using sensors, second for sending data to cloud storage and the last part was providing the detected data for remote viewing. Remote viewing of the data enables a doctor or guardian to monitor a patient’s health progress away from hospital premises. The Internet of Things (IoT) concepts have been widely used to interconnect the available medical resources and offer smart, reliable, and effective healthcare service to the patients. Health monitoring for active and assisted living is one of the paradigms that can use the IoT advantages to improve the patient’s lifestyle. In this project, I have presented an IoT architecture customized for healthcare applications. The aim of the project was to come up with a Remote Health Monitoring System that can be made with locally available sensors with a view to making it affordable if it were to be mass produced. Hence the proposed architecture collects the sensor data through Arduino microcontroller and relays it to the cloud where it is processed and analyzed for remote viewing. Feedback actions based on the analyzed data can be sent back to the doctor or guardian through Email and/or SMS alerts in case of any emergencies.

First part of this thesis presents the design, validation, and implementation of an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter and receiver on a Cyclone II FPGA chip using DSP builder and Quartus II high level design tools. The resources in terms of logical elements (LE) including combinational functions and logic registers allocated by the model have been investigated and addressed. The result shows that implementing the basic OFDM transceiver allocates about 14% (equivalent to 6% at transmitter and 8% at receiver) of the available LE resources on an Altera Cyclone II EP2C35F672C6 FPGA chip, largely taken up by the FFT, IFFT and soft decision encoder. Secondly, a new wavelet-based OFDM system based on FDPP-DA based channel estimation is proposed as a reliable ECG Patient Monitoring System, a Personal Wireless telemedicine application. The system performance for different wavelet mothers has been investigated. The effects of AWGN and multipath Rayleigh fading channels have also been studied in the analysis. The performances of FDPP-DA and HDPP-DA-based channel estimations are compared based on both DFT-based OFDM and wavelet-based OFDM systems. The system model was studied using MATLAB software in which the average BER was addressed for randomized data. The main error differences that reflect the quality of the received ECG signals between the reconstructed and original ECG signals are established. Finally a DA-based architecture for 1-D iDWT/DWT based on an OFDM model is implemented for an ECG-PMS wireless telemedicine application. In the portable wireless body transmitter unit at the patient site, a fully Serial-DA-based scheme for iDWT is realized to support higher hardware utilization and lower power consumption; whereas a fully Parallel-DA-based scheme for DWT is applied at the base unit of the hospital site to support a higher throughput. It should be noted that the behavioural level of HDL models of the proposed system was developed and implemented to confirm its correctness in simulation. Then, after the simulation process the design models were synthesised and implemented for the target FPGA to confirm their validation.

First part of this thesis presents the design, validation, and implementation of an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter and receiver on a Cyclone II FPGA chip using DSP builder and Quartus II high level design tools. The resources in terms of logical elements (LE) including combinational functions and logic registers allocated by the model have been investigated and addressed. The result shows that implementing the basic OFDM transceiver allocates about 14% (equivalent to 6% at transmitter and 8% at receiver) of the available LE resources on an Altera Cyclone II EP2C35F672C6 FPGA chip, largely taken up by the FFT, IFFT and soft decision encoder. Secondly, a new wavelet-based OFDM system based on FDPP-DA based channel estimation is proposed as a reliable ECG Patient Monitoring System, a Personal Wireless telemedicine application. The system performance for different wavelet mothers has been investigated. The effects of AWGN and multipath Rayleigh fading channels have also been studied in the analysis. The performances of FDPP-DA and HDPP-DA-based channel estimations are compared based on both DFT-based OFDM and wavelet-based OFDM systems. The system model was studied using MATLAB software in which the average BER was addressed for randomized data. The main error differences that reflect the quality of the received ECG signals between the reconstructed and original ECG signals are established. Finally a DA-based architecture for 1-D iDWT/DWT based on an OFDM model is implemented for an ECG-PMS wireless telemedicine application. In the portable wireless body transmitter unit at the patient site, a fully Serial-DA-based scheme for iDWT is realized to support higher hardware utilization and lower power consumption; whereas a fully Parallel-DA-based scheme for DWT is applied at the base unit of the hospital site to support a higher throughput. It should be noted that the behavioural level of HDL models of the proposed system was developed and implemented to confirm its correctness in simulation. Then, after the simulation process the design models were synthesised and implemented for the target FPGA to confirm their validation.

Significant challenges to patient monitoring systems in a hospital environment include the reliable and energy-efficient transmission of data and their real-time display. This thesis proposes innovative and novel mechanisms for the reliable transmission of patient data in Body Area Network (BAN) communication, which simultaneously ensure high throughput, low data latency, and low energy consumption by implementing energy and QoS aware routing protocols. Five main contributions are made in this regard. Firstly, a novel patient monitoring system (ZK-BAN peering framework) is proposed for real-time hospital BAN communication that displays patient data on the display units by considering data privacy, low energy consumption, better control on the devices, and patient mobility. Secondly, a novel energy-aware peering routing protocol (EPR) is introduced in which the choice of next hop is based on the residual energy and geographic information of the neighbor nodes. EPR contains three main components: a Hello protocol, a neighbor table constructor algorithm, and a routing table constructor algorithm. Thirdly, a new modular QoS-aware routing protocol (QPRD) is designed to handle the ordinary and delay-sensitive data for BAN communication in hospitals. QPRD provides an end-to-end path delay mechanism to calculate the path delays of all possible paths from a source to destination and then chooses the best path with the lowest path delay for delay-sensitive packets. Fourthly, a novel modular QoS-aware routing protocol (QPRR) is developed to handle ordinary and reliability-sensitive data for BAN communication in hospitals. The modular architecture of QPRR includes five modules: a reliability module, a packet classifier, a Hello protocol module, a routing services module, and a QoS-aware queuing module. The proposed mechanisms for end-to-end path reliability calculation and data transmission using redundant paths ensure more reliable BAN communication. Finally, a new integrated energy and QoS aware routing protocol (ZEQoS) is designed to deal with ordinary, delay-sensitive, and reliability-sensitive data packets. Extensive simulations in the OMNeT++ based Castalia 3.2 simulator show that EPR, QPRD, QPRR, and ZEQoS perform better than other similar energy and QoS aware routing protocols.