Eligibility

Abstract

The problem approached by us is the difficulty of an individual to put together a health a sports and entertainment plan that fits his busy agenda and health condition, exploring local facilities.

This problem arises from the overwhelmingly wide choice of activities and busy facilities that often require reservation, and the lack of time and medical knowledge for finding the right facility from our health point of view.

Using our free time wisely becomes even more difficult when we are moving to a new area, and we have no preliminary knowledge of the possibilities our new residence offers.

The wide spreading of data (medical, health condition and facility related) puts people in an even more confusing situation, having a great risk of skipping relevant information.

Looking at the surface of the problem we have one individual with real human needs (keeping fit, social, biological) and then we have info providers - institutions specialized in offering health services whether these services are related to sports, entertainment or medical.

Our aim is to design a SOA based health-planning expert system accessible from mobile devices or web browsers, that offers the user a short, middle or long- term localized health plan and reservation system, based on the users agenda, medical records, personal profile, monitoring sensor data, local weather information and qualified expert suggestions.

This means harvesting the potential health and financial benefits of health information technology (HIT) by the widespread adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems.

virtualPLANNER unifies health and entertainment facility offers and medical information sources, filters and presents relevant data while still leaving the individual the freedom of choice.

The beneficiary of our system is offered a personalized short, middle or long- term plan that he can customize and accept. The plan is materialized in a task list inserted into the users agenda on the mobile device, while all necessary reservations are taken care of by the system.

Info providers have the possibility to register their facilities in the system in order to offer the clients more accesibility and implicitly increasing the number of their potential clients. The architecture also allows info providers (e.g. private medical canters) to offer premium services to their clients.

Planificator experts (doctors, psychologists, etc) use our visual Strategy Builder to create strategies used by the health- planning expert system.

virtualPLANNER also creates statistics in form of graphics and charts of the evolution of the beneficiaryas health condition in order to illustrate the results of using the system.

The user also has the possibility to retrieve maps to the facilities and localized weather reports.

The innovation of virtualPLANNER is the direct and transparent connection of the individual with qualified experts using the multiple, widely spread data stores.

Scenarios

User requests/is offered a task list containing the activities that were chosen for him by the virtualPLANNER.

User receives a task list from the virtualPLANNER. The list is presented to the user by the application installed on his mobile device. This application checks with the web services offered by the Main Planning Service (MPS). User reviews the tasks list and approves some of them. The approved tasks are then automatically entered into his agenda and if the tasks require reservation, these reservations are also handled automatically by the virtualPLANNER. The reservations the user makes, for example for a medical consult, can be cancelled at useras request. User can also get a reminder saying that some event is approaching.

Health facility dynamically registeres its services in the system.

Some InfoProvider(IP) (e.g. Hospital, gym, cinema, theatre etc.) wants to make their service availability known to the public. This can be made by entering on the virtualPLANNER site and dynamically registering their service. Registration of these services is contract based. This means they have to conform to some specific known interface. An example of information that has to be provided is location used by the planner to provide localized health support. These services are accessed by the InfoService(IS) domain specialized servers. These servers are specialized in gathering and organizing data from a certain range of domains (e.g. medical and sports/entertainment).

Experts share knowledge with the system in order to achieve a greater customer satisfaction.

The plans that the virtualPLANNER provides can be more accurate and more suitable for the client with the use of any additional information the system can get. For this, the system has a module found on the (Main Planning Service) MPS that helps professionals define rules and strategies. These rules or heuristics are entered using MPSas visualStrategyBuilder and used by the task planner for providing a more accurate and more useful task list.

User can see graphical reports and statistics regarding the results of using the virtualPLANNER.

After using the system for a while, the user wants to see if there are some improvements in his general health condition. The system accesses continuously its data sources (InfoProviders, planning services) and gathers necessary information for establishing useful reports that can be used to make graphical representation of how the system affected the general health condition of the client.

Architecture

»         Mobile Device Application

»         Based on Windows Mobile 5.0 and .NET Compact Framework 2.0

»         Connects the user to the virtualPLANNER system

»         Features secure authentication and asynchronous web service invocations

»         Uses GPS receiver (integrated, or connected)

»         Monitoring Sensors

»         Used to continuously monitor the useras vital signs during demanding activities or to periodically gather data (if the user doesnat have any of these sensors he has the possibility to manually enter data, or not to use monitoring)

»         Sensors can be wired, or bluetooth enabled

»         Sensor types: Blood pressure sensors, Pulse sensors, Weight sensors (scale)

The system supports extensibility (adding of new sensors)

(for simulation and testing purposes we use socket based emulators for sensors and GPS receiver)

»         Main Planning Service

MPS is the central module in systemas architecture. Its role is to plan tasks according to user needs and expert advice materialized in strategies.

System cannot accomplish what it was build for without a very important piece of information a user profile information. Basically a MPS user profile is build from the following data: contact details, favorite activities and hobbies, basic strategy preferences.

Main Planning Service data store contains not only users personal profile but it also acts as a temporary cache for miscellaneous data used by the system. Such data can be sensor data, values used for statistics and charts etc.

Another aspect of MPSas great importance in systemas functionality is related to building planning strategies. A strategy is a set of rules imposed by domain experts mainly based on general health condition profiles and/or disability categories.

»         Medical Record Info Service (MRIS)

»         Central Component to Medical Information Data

»         Unifies Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems

»         Uses contract based dynamic Web Service registration

»         Gathers, processes and filters Medical Data, and returns the result to the Main Planning Service

»         When searching for data it checks for all occurrences of data for a certain individual and forwards the most up to date information

»         Has its own administration webpage that allows Medical Info Providers register their web services based on a contract

»         Public Web Services

»         Must provide a well defined standard interface

»         Secure authentication in order to ensure confidentiality of sensitive information

»         Keep all information (e.g. Opening Hours) up to date

»         Must offer on-line reservation possibility

»         Health Sports  Entertainment Info Service (HSE IS)

»         Concentrates all facility Info Providers

»         Info providers have the possibility to register their facilities in the system in order to offer the clients accessibility and implicitly increasing the number of their potential clients. Uses contract based dynamic Web Service registration

»         Has its own administration webpage that allows HSE Info Providers register their web services based on a contract

»         Facilities are registered location oriented, so that users can get localized offers

Technologies

»         Entire solution designed on .NET Framework 2.0

»         Mobile development

»         .NET Compact Framework 2.0

»         Windows Mobile 5.0 (PocketPC, SmartPhone SDK)

»         Native APIas (Today theme support)

»         Managed APIas (Pocket Outlook)

»         Web development

»         ASP.NET 2.0 (using master pages, web parts, etc)

»         ADO.NET 2.0

»         Web Service development

»         SOAP, DISCO, UDDI

»         Native SQL Server2005 endpoints

»         WSDL

»         Contract based dynamic WS registration

»         Database Development

»         SQL Server 2005

»         Socket- based programming (for demonstration purposes)

»         Mobile Device Time Controller

»         GPS receiver emulator

»         Monitoring sensor emulators

»         AI algorithm

»         The Main Planning Service

»         Microsoft MapPoint integration

»         Microsoft Speech Server (future addition)

Screen Shots

How could you take this further?

While designing the architecture of the solution we dedicated a very important attention to scalability, extensibility and configurability.

Based on this we present here a list of possibilities of additional features our system can be added:

»         Improving the AI planning system

a        More flexible rules

a        More complex strategies

a        Further development of the visual Strategy Builder

»         Multi-user joint Program

a        Allows a circle friends to make a common plan

a        Uses more relaxed search criteria to find common activities

a        GOAL: to get people interact and be together

»         Multimedia Streaming

a        Microsoft Speech Server integration

»         Customized support for people with disabilities

Current stage of development

We implemented most of the features of the solution. We gave special attention to the proper integration of all modules. We designed and implemented a wide range of simulators (sensor simulators, GPS simulator, weather simulator), the client application for both PocketPC and SmartPhone, we build a website for both the users and administrators of the system and we loaded a set of demonstration data (facility related data, medical records, etc.

  The idea of our solution came a few months earlier, and we started working on our solution about two month ago.