TCS – mHealth winner 2015
CONNECTED WELLNESS – An Approach for Cloud Connected Sensing for Healthcare and Wellness
Connected wellness and healthcare can be the next generation revenue earner for telecommunication service providers who can provide these services as bouquet of value added services (VAS). This might involve patient and elderly people monitoring by indoor localization and recognition of activities of daily living (ADL),connected physiological sensing and remote monitoring of health trends, calorie and workout management. Emergency features like fall detection can also be added to the suite. The advent of Smartphones has ensured connectivity to the masses and with peer-to-peer (P2P) connections like Bluetooth ensures connectivity to personal healthcare devices. Further, Smartphone sensors can themselves be used to elucidate activity and certain physiological parameters. Finally, cloud connectivity ensures remote monitoring and intervention and data integrity. This can further lead to opportunities like telemedicine and tele-rehabilitation.
This paper discusses a connected application suite available via the TCS Connected Universe Platform (TCUP). The TCUP connected applications are showcased on a Mobile Platform (Android device) which includes HeartSense, Aktrak and Fall Detection applications. HeartSense is a robust non-intrusive real time heart-rate (HR) and blood pressure (BP) measurement application from Photoplathysmograph (PPG). The second application is Aktrak that is used for activity classification, step counting and calorie estimation. The novelty of this application is that it can work independent of any personalization and the phone can be kept in any placement and orientation with respect to user’s body. The third application is a fall detection application, which can detect user fall from phone inertial sensor data. The major issue with detecting falls using accelerometer is the number of false positives that get generated; we have developed an algorithm that provides appreciable precision as well as recall thereby reducing false positives.
TCS Connected Universe Platform offers a set of services that allow enterprises to easily develop, deploy, and administer Internet of Things(IoT) software applications such as web apps, real-time analytics (complex event processing), and batch analytics programs. The application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by the platform can be used by software programmers, while administrators can use the Connected Universe portal, along with another set of APIs, to manage IoT services. Healthcare and wellness is therefore provided as a service on top of TCUP, which can use underlying features of TCUP like data-storage, visualization, time-series analysis of data and predictive analytics. Such services can be used in future for risk assessment and trend analysis of patients as well as demography.
