Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare (D2H2)

Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare (D2H2) is an outgrowth of the miniaturization and integration of instrumentation (wearable and implanted) for measurement, computing, signal processing, communication, and healthcare informatics. This integrative systems approach will revolutionize the practice of medicine in the new century, enabling the delivery of healthcare to patients anywhere in the world by combining bio-sensing and information technologies with medical expertise. It will facilitate the transition from central and hospital-based medical diagnosis and healthcare delivery to distributed diagnosis and home healthcare (D2H2). This book is divided into two parts: Part 1 is devoted to distributed diagnosis and part 2 is devoted to home healthcare. Part 1 of this book deals with distributed diagnosis. The chapters throughout part 1 cover a wide range of areas, including a comprehensive study of the diabetic foot, an analysis and detailed classification of plantar pressures with and without diabetes type 2, and a study of the features extracted from the various kinds of fundus eye images namely, normal, mild, moderate, severe, and prolific diabetes retinopathy which are fed to the feed-forward classifier for classification into normal, non-proliferative, and proliferative diabetes retinopathy classes. Part 2 of this book deals with the home healthcare system. Home healthcare appliances, solutions, and motion analysis for the clinical rehabilitation are discussed. One study deals with the personalized cardiac monitoring for monitoring cardiac state and vital signs by non-intrusive monitoring. Finally, the book concludes with the ethics in (D2H2) and the future of the healthcare system leading to the next generation of research topics that will directly impact distributed diagnostics and home healthcare. This book takes a comprehensive look at biomedical instrumentation, bio-signal processing, data mining applications, medical imaging, bioinformatics, modeling, and medical networking tools that support telemedicine, and, more broadly, distributed diagnosis and home healthcare. The book has been divided into two parts. Part I: Diagnostics - Physiological Signal Analysis Part II: Home Healthcare - Healthcare Design and Decision Support