Katzis, Konstantinos

The Artificial Pancreas is a medical device, currently in development, that aims to provide automatic regulation of blood glucose (BG) levels in ambulatory type 1 diabetes mellitus sufferers. The most popular approach utilises subcutaneous (SC) continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) combined with SC insulin injection controlled by a Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm. From a safety risk perspective problematic elements include the performance robustness of the CGM and the need for a pre-meal insulin bolus to provide satisfactory post prandial BG regulation. This contribution presents preliminary in silico studies which indicate that the use of an alternative approach to insulin delivery - intra-peritoneal (IP) infusion - could provide a similar level of BG regulation (as obtained with SC delivery), without the need for the pre-meal bolus. This simplified control architecture would remove the patient safety risk related to the administration (or not) of pre-meal bolus.

5G wireless is the next step in the evolution of mobile communications with the aim being to provide connectivity for any kind of device and any kind of application. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) constitute just one component of connected healthcare utilising small intelligent physiological sensors either on or implanted in the human body. This contribution examines the 5G technologies that will make a significant contribution to providing secure healthcare-orientated WBANs with improved energy efficiency, interference mitigation and wireless power transfer capability.

Integrated care paradigms depend on multiple sources of data. The quality of data used in decision-making will ultimately affect the delivered care to the patient. Quality includes several dimensions, which may affect the result. This paper presents how data quality dimensions may affect the delivered service, and propose a conceptual framework for the classification of confidence in data used in clinical decision-making for integrated care.

Protecting connected medical devices from evolving cyber related threats, requires a continuous lifecycle approach whereby cybersecurity is integrated within the product development lifecycle and both complements and re-enforces the safety risk management processes therein. This contribution reviews the guidance relating to medical device cybersecurity within the product development lifecycle.

Realizing 'totally connected healthcare' is probably the most important step towards providing both high quality and cost effective patient treatment in the future. Home-based sensing, wearable medical devices and tele-consultation will all contribute to providing continuous health monitoring, evaluation and treatment. A major obstacle will be Quality of Service within an already overcrowded frequency spectrum. The unlicensed use of TV White Spaces, frequency bands that act as buffers between licensed Digital Terrestrial Television bands, has been proposed as one approach to helping alleviate the 'spectrum crunch'. UHF TV White Spaces also bring propagation advantages over conventional Wi-Fi potentially realising relatively low-cost broadband in remote areas which will greatly benefit the uptake of rural telehealth. This contribution provides an introduction to the use of TVWS, the evolution of IEEE standards to address its usage and current healthcare-based TVWS developments and challenges.

Modern Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs), implement capabilities that have contributed significantly to patient outcomes, as well as quality of life. The ever increasing connectivity of IMD's does raise security concerns though there are instances where implemented security measures might impact on patient safety. The paper discusses challenges of addressing both of these attributes in parallel.

A Urine Monitoring Device (UMOD) has been designed and implemented for monitoring postoperative urination. This device has been created primarily to assist nurses and doctors monitor patients during their postoperative and recovery period. Furthermore, to reduce the burden of the nursing staff required to regularly monitor and empty the urine bags saving them precious time. The device consists of a stand and a load cell where the urine bag is attached. The stand is light and can easily move shall the patient require to move. An ESP Wi-Fi microprocessor module is used to calculate the rate of flow of urine in real time, identify and ignore any false readings due to accidental movements of the urine bag using an accelerometer and transmit the readings to a server / cloud through the local Wi-Fi.

Recent technological advances in electronics, wireless communications and low cost medical sensors generated a plethora of Wearable Medical Devices (WMDs), which are capable of generating considerably large amounts of new, unstructured real-time data. This contribution outlines how this data can be propagated to a healthcare system through the internet, using long distance Radio Access Networks (RANs) and proposes a novel communication system architecture employing White Space Devices (WSD) to provide seamless connectivity to its users. Initial findings indicate that the proposed communication system can facilitate broadband services over a large geographical area taking advantage of the freely available TV White Spaces (TVWS).