The Open Medical Informatics Journal

2009, 3 : 44-53
Published online 2009 June 26. DOI: 10.2174/1874431100903010044
Publisher ID: TOMINFOJ-3-44

RESEARCH ARTICLE
 New Application of IEEE 11073 to Home Health Care

Isao Mizukura , Toshiyo Tamura, * , Yutaka Kimura and Wenwei Yu
Department of Medical System Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chiba University, 1-33 Yayoi-cho, Inage-ku, Chiba 263-8522, Japan

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Medical System Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chiba University, 1-33 Yayoicho, Inage-ku, Chiba 263-8522, Japan; Tel: +81432903050; Fax: +81432903050; E-mails: , E-mailtamurat@faculty.chiba-u.jp

ABSTRACT

We propose a new home health care network for the acquisition and transmission of data from ordinary home health care appliances based on IEEE11073. In this study, we develop a standard protocol for data collection and a simple interface to accommodate different monitoring systems that make use of different data protocols. The system provides for one-way data transmission, thus saving power and conforming to Japanese pharmaceutical law. Our standardized protocol was verified during a 1-year field test involving 20 households in Japan. Data transmission errors between home health care devices and the home gateway were 4.21 per a day with our newly developed standard protocol. Over a 1 year period, we collected and analyzed data from 241,000 separate sources associated with healthy, home-based patients and chronically ill, clinic-based patients, the latter through physician intervention. We evaluate some of the possible applications for collecting daily health care data and introduce some of our findings relating primarily to body weight and blood pressure monitoring for elderly subjects in their own homes.