Towards simulation of patient data for evaluation of E-health platform and services.

This paper presents the design and implementation of the Patient Simulator, a software application used for the simulation of patient data. The simulator aims to evaluate e- Health platforms and services in regards to efficiency, reliability, security and scalability without the need to use real patient data. Using discrete event based simulation in conjunction with random normal distribution techniques, preliminary prototyping of the Patient Simulator shows that it is capable of generating five vital physiological signs including heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, oxygen levels and respiration rate. Offline performance evaluation of the software shows that it is capable of simulating up to 10,000 patients with average CPU utilisation of 57.53% and memory usage of 159.30 MB. Future work aims to validate the accuracy of data simulated along with integrating the simulator with existing e-Health technologies to evaluate the capabilities of this software in an online environment.

[1]  Peggy Gregory,et al.  Expectations and experiences of eHealth in primary care: A qualitative practice-based investigation , 2009, Int. J. Medical Informatics.

[2]  S Holm,et al.  Ethical aspects of clinical trials: the attitudes of the public and out‐patients , 1999, Journal of internal medicine.

[3]  R. Hesselfeldt,et al.  Evaluation of the airway of the SimMan™ full‐scale patient simulator , 2005, Acta anaesthesiologica Scandinavica.

[4]  U. Rajendra Acharya,et al.  Heart rate variability: a review , 2006, Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing.

[5]  Matt-Mouley Bouamrane,et al.  Using Ontologies for an Intelligent Patient Modelling, Adaptation and Management System , 2008, OTM Conferences.

[6]  William J. Buchanan,et al.  DACAR Platform for eHealth Services Cloud , 2011, 2011 IEEE 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing.

[7]  Jean-Claude Tardif,et al.  Resting heart rate in cardiovascular disease. , 2007, Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

[8]  Sebastian Garde,et al.  Health Informatics: An Overview , 2010 .

[9]  C. Chatfield,et al.  Statistics for physicists , 1971 .

[10]  L. Shoemaker Allen,et al.  What's Normal? – Temperature, Gender, and Heart Rate , 1996 .

[11]  Ricardo Araya,et al.  Therapist-delivered internet psychotherapy for depression in primary care: a randomised controlled trial , 2009, The Lancet.

[12]  R. Istepanian,et al.  Mobile e-health: the unwired evolution of telemedicine. , 2003, Telemedicine journal and e-health : the official journal of the American Telemedicine Association.

[13]  Trevor Spedding,et al.  Modelling patient arrivals when simulating an Accident and Emergency Unit , 2008, 2008 Winter Simulation Conference.

[14]  K. Wilson,et al.  A Survey of Health-Related Activities on Second Life , 2009, Journal of medical Internet research.

[15]  Sergei Nirenburg,et al.  Cognitive Simulation in Virtual Patients , 2006, FLAIRS.

[16]  John Spencer,et al.  Meeting the needs of simulated patients and caring for the person behind them? , 2006, Medical education.

[17]  Scott Reeves,et al.  Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) , 1999 .

[18]  H J Braune,et al.  Measurement of heart rate variations: influencing factors, normal values and diagnostic impact on diabetic autonomic neuropathy. , 1995, Diabetes research and clinical practice.

[19]  V. Howard,et al.  Human Patient Simulators and Interactive Case Studies: A Comparative Analysis of Learning Outcomes and Student Perceptions , 2010, Computers, informatics, nursing : CIN.

[20]  Nathan K. Cobb,et al.  Initial evaluation of a real-world Internet smoking cessation system. , 2005, Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco.

[21]  P. Mackowiak,et al.  A critical appraisal of 98.6 degrees F, the upper limit of the normal body temperature, and other legacies of Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich. , 1992, JAMA.

[22]  A. Cinar,et al.  Glucosim: Educational Software for Virtual Experiments with Patients with Type 1 Diabetes , 2005, 2005 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology 27th Annual Conference.

[23]  Robert V. Brill,et al.  Applied Statistics and Probability for Engineers , 2004, Technometrics.

[24]  B. O'driscoll,et al.  BTS guideline for emergency oxygen use in adult patients , 2008, Thorax.

[25]  Taesik Lee,et al.  Reducing Emergency Department overcrowding - five patient buffer concepts in comparison , 2008, 2008 Winter Simulation Conference.

[26]  J. Banks,et al.  Discrete-Event System Simulation , 1995 .

[27]  Benjamin Lok,et al.  Integrating conversational virtual humans and mannequin patient simulators to present mixed reality clinical training experiences , 2009, 2009 8th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.

[28]  Isi Mitrani Simulation techniques for discrete event systems , 1982, Cambridge computer science texts.

[29]  Sergei Nirenburg,et al.  Integrating Cognitive Simulation into the Maryland Virtual Patient , 2009, MMVR.

[30]  G R Pesola,et al.  The normal difference in bilateral indirect blood pressure recordings in normotensive individuals. , 2001, The American journal of emergency medicine.

[31]  Nicholas R. Hardiker,et al.  Factors that influence public engagement with eHealth: A literature review , 2011, Int. J. Medical Informatics.