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The information age has enabled unprecedented levels of data to be collected and stored. At the same time, society and organizations have become increasingly complex. Consequently, decisions in many facets have become increasingly complex but have the potential to be better informed. Technologies for Supporting Reasoning Communities and Collaborative Decision Making: Cooperative Approaches includes chapters from diverse fields of enquiry including decision science, political science, argumentation, knowledge management, cognitive psychology and business intelligence. Each chapter illustrates a perspective on group reasoning that ultimately aims to lead to a greater understanding of reasoning communities and inform technological developments.
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Abstract: - In time-critical and data intensive applications, efficient acquisition of sensitive datasets is a challenge because of network congestion, void regions and node failures that commonly occur in wireless sensor networks (WSN), while monitoring the wellbeing of patients with serious medical conditions. The sensor devices attached to such patients are used for monitoring the vital signs of those with serious heart problems, Parkinson disease, Epilepsy and high blood pressure. This paper typically focuses on the reliable acquisition of datasets and provides a fault-tolerant priority based routing scheme with Dynamic Jumping (FTMPR-DJ) for the energy-efficient acquisition and dissemination of datasets. A new fault-tolerant scheme has been proposed that will significantly minimize data loss and network congestion and is well supported with extensive experiments to show effectiveness of the proposed routing scheme.
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Continuous monitoring of patient's physiological signs has the potential to augment traditional medical practice, particularly in developing countries that have a shortage of healthcare professionals. However, continuously streamed data presents additional security, storage and retrieval challenges and further inhibits initiatives to integrate data to form electronic health record systems. Blockchain technologies enable data to be stored securely and inexpensively without recourse to a trusted authority. Blockchain technologies also promise to provide architectures for electronic health records that do not require huge government expenditure that challenge developing nations. However, Blockchain deployment, particularly with streamed data challenges existing Blockchain algorithms that take too long to place data in a block, and have no mechanism to determine whether every data point in every stream should be stored in such a secure way. This article presents an architecture that involves a Patient Agent, coordinating the insertion of continuous data streams into Blockchains to form an electronic health record.
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Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
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Fully integrated electronic health records (EHR) provide healthcare providers and patients access to records across a health care system and promise efficient and effective provision of health care. However, fully integrated records have proven to be very expensive and difficult to establish. Currently. EHR's have been developed largely to accommodate Western medicine events. These barriers impact on the introduction of EHR's in Sri Lanka, where health budgets are already stretched and Ayurvedic medicine is routinely practiced alongside Allopathic medicine. This article identifies requirements for EHR in the Sri Lankan context and advances a model for the introduction of EHR's that suits that context. The model is justified by drawing on insights and experiences with EHR in Western nations.
Description:
Fully integrated electronic health records (EHR) provide healthcare providers and patients access to records across a health care system and promise efficient and effective provision of health care. However, fully integrated records have proven to be very expensive and difficult to establish. Currently. EHR's have been developed largely to accommodate Western medicine events. These barriers impact on the introduction of EHR's in Sri Lanka, where health budgets are already stretched and Ayurvedic medicine is routinely practiced alongside Allopathic medicine. This article identifies requirements for EHR in the Sri Lankan context and advances a model for the introduction of EHR's that suits that context. The model is justified by drawing on insights and experiences with EHR in Western nations.
Description:
An Electrocardiogram (ECG) records the electrical impulses of the heart and indicates rhythm anomalies for diagnostic purposes [1], [2]. A typical ECG tracing of the cardiac cycle consists of a P wave, QRS complex, and T wave [3]. Good performance of an ECG analyzing system depends heavily upon the accurate and reliable detection of the QRS complex, as well as the T and P waves [4]. A Bundle Branch Block (BBB) is a delay or obstruction along electrical impulse pathways of the heart manifesting in a prolonged QRS interval usually greater than 120ms. The automated detection and classification of a BBB is important for prompt, accurate diagnosis and treatment to reduce morbidity and mortality.
Description:
The protocol diversities of mobile ad hoc have already got hold of the field to a peak of a matured and developed area. Still, the restraint of delay and bandwidth of mobile ad hoc network have kept a little room to draft a routing protocol for the pursuit of providing quality of service. In the paper, we proposed protocol namely Efficient Route Selection in Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing. We select the best path among multiple paths from source to destination using covariance and delay. We consider the delay, link stability and energy to devise a covariance-based metric to discover the most balanced path. We also propose a metric for the selection of a node that acts as a local backup node for the most vulnerable nodes on the selected path. We accomplish our implementation in NS3and it shows the more reliable path and less end to end delay than other counterpart protocols.
Description:
The protocol diversities of mobile ad hoc have already got hold of the field to a peak of a matured and developed area. Still, the restraint of delay and bandwidth of mobile ad hoc network have kept a little room to draft a routing protocol for the pursuit of providing quality of service. In the paper, we proposed protocol namely Efficient Route Selection in Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing. We select the best path among multiple paths from source to destination using covariance and delay. We consider the delay, link stability and energy to devise a covariance-based metric to discover the most balanced path. We also propose a metric for the selection of a node that acts as a local backup node for the most vulnerable nodes on the selected path. We accomplish our implementation in NS3and it shows the more reliable path and less end to end delay than other counterpart protocols.
Description:
Missing values may be present in data without undermining its use for diagnostic / classification purposes but compromise application of readily available software. Surrogate entries can remedy the situation, although the outcome is generally unknown. Discretization of continuous attributes renders all data nominal and is helpful in dealing with missing values; particularly, no special handling is required for different attribute types. A number of classifiers exist or can be reformulated for this representation. Some classifiers can be reinvented as data completion methods. In this work the Decision Tree, Nearest Neighbour, and Naive Bayesian methods are demonstrated to have the required aptness. An approach is implemented whereby the entered missing values are not necessarily a close match of the true data; however, they intend to cause the least hindrance for classification. The proposed techniques find their application particularly in medical diagnostics. Where clinical data represents a number of related conditions, taking Cartesian product of class values of the underlying sub-problems allows narrowing down of the selection of missing value substitutes. Real-world data examples, some publically available, are enlisted for testing. The proposed and benchmark methods are compared by classifying the data before and after missing value imputation, indicating a significant improvement.
Description:
Missing values may be present in data without undermining its use for diagnostic / classification purposes but compromise application of readily available software. Surrogate entries can remedy the situation, although the outcome is generally unknown. Discretization of continuous attributes renders all data nominal and is helpful in dealing with missing values; particularly, no special handling is required for different attribute types. A number of classifiers exist or can be reformulated for this representation. Some classifiers can be reinvented as data completion methods. In this work the Decision Tree, Nearest Neighbour, and Naive Bayesian methods are demonstrated to have the required aptness. An approach is implemented whereby the entered missing values are not necessarily a close match of the true data; however, they intend to cause the least hindrance for classification. The proposed techniques find their application particularly in medical diagnostics. Where clinical data represents a number of related conditions, taking Cartesian product of class values of the underlying sub-problems allows narrowing down of the selection of missing value substitutes. Real-world data examples, some publically available, are enlisted for testing. The proposed and benchmark methods are compared by classifying the data before and after missing value imputation, indicating a significant improvement.
Description:
An effective relationship between business processes and their relevant strategies helps enterprises achieve their goals. As a business organisation changes quickly, business processes implement their relevant business operations for efficiency. It is important to know which business process achieves which business strategies dynamically. To the best of our knowledge, there exists a framework which aims to automatically determine the strategy-process relationship (Morrison et al. 2011). However, this framework can only work when the effect of the business process is known, but it is difficult to determine such effect accurately. Moreover, by optimising business processes to satisfy business strategies, higher efficiency may be achieved but there is a high chance of losing discriminative information. It therefore creates certain level of uncertainty in achieving accurate strategy-process relationship. To reduce this uncertainty and determine the relationship accurately between business processes and their relevant strategies as defined by business domain experts, in this paper, we introduce a rule-based inference model. This model not only helps business organisations realize which business processes need to be involved for the organisation to achieve their goals when strategies are made, but also reduces the possibility of losing important details from business process optimisation. We have developed a business case to validate our proposed model and the results show that our model can infer the relation accurately for each rule defined for the related business case.
Description:
Recently, we are witnessing an exponential growth in remote monitoring and mobile applications for healthcare. These solutions are all designed to ultimately enable the consumer to enjoy better healthcare delivery and /or wellness. In order to understand this growing area, we believe it is necessary to develop a framework to analyse and evaluate these solutions. The purpose of this chapter then is to offer a suitable taxonomy to systematically analyse and evaluate the existing solutions based on number of dimensions including technological, clinical, social, and economic.
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The Internet of Things (IoT) has facilitated services without human intervention for a wide range of applications, including continuous remote patient monitoring (RPM). However, the complexity of RPM architectures, the size of data sets generated and limited power capacity of devices make RPM challenging. In this paper, we propose a tier-based End to End architecture for continuous patient monitoring that has a patient centric agent (PCA) as its center piece. The PCA manages a blockchain component to preserve privacy when data streaming from body area sensors needs to be stored securely. The PCA based architecture includes a lightweight communication protocol to enforce security of data through different segments of a continuous, real time patient monitoring architecture. The architecture includes the insertion of data into a personal blockchain to facilitate data sharing amongst healthcare professionals and integration into electronic health records while ensuring privacy is maintained. The blockchain is customized for RPM with modifications that include having the PCA select a Miner to reduce computational effort, enabling the PCA to manage multiple blockchains for the same patient, and the modification of each block with a prefix tree to minimize energy consumption and incorporate secure transaction payments. Simulation results demonstrate that security and privacy can be enhanced in RPM with the PCA based End to End architecture.
Description:
The Internet of Things (IoT) has facilitated services without human intervention for a wide range of applications, including continuous remote patient monitoring (RPM). However, the complexity of RPM architectures, the size of data sets generated and limited power capacity of devices make RPM challenging. In this paper, we propose a tier-based End to End architecture for continuous patient monitoring that has a patient centric agent (PCA) as its center piece. The PCA manages a blockchain component to preserve privacy when data streaming from body area sensors needs to be stored securely. The PCA based architecture includes a lightweight communication protocol to enforce security of data through different segments of a continuous, real time patient monitoring architecture. The architecture includes the insertion of data into a personal blockchain to facilitate data sharing amongst healthcare professionals and integration into electronic health records while ensuring privacy is maintained. The blockchain is customized for RPM with modifications that include having the PCA select a Miner to reduce computational effort, enabling the PCA to manage multiple blockchains for the same patient, and the modification of each block with a prefix tree to minimize energy consumption and incorporate secure transaction payments. Simulation results demonstrate that security and privacy can be enhanced in RPM with the PCA based End to End architecture.
Description:
Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) offer enhanced insight into the biological functions and biochemical pathways of cells associated with gene regulatory mechanisms. However, obtaining accurate GRNs that explain gene expressions and functional associations remains a difficult task. Only a few studies have incorporated heuristics into a GRN discovery process. Doing so has the potential to improve accuracy and reduce the search space and computational time. A technique for GRN discovery that integrates heuristic information into the discovery process is advanced. The approach incorporates three elements: 1) a novel 2D visualized coexpression function that measures the association between genes; 2) a post-processing step that improves detection of up, down and self-regulation and 3) the application of heuristics to generate a Hub network as the backbone of the GRN. Using available microarray and next generation sequencing data from Escherichia coli, six synthetic benchmark GRN datasets were generated with the neighborhood addition and cluster addition methods available in SynTReN. Results of the novel 2D-visualization co-expression function were compared with results obtained using Pearson's correlation and mutual information. The performance of the biological genetics-based heuristics consisting of the 2D-Visualized Co-expression function, post-processing and Hub network was then evaluated by comparing the performance to the GRNs obtained by ARACNe and CLR. The 2D-Visualized Co-expression function significantly improved gene-gene association matching compared to Pearson's correlation coefficient (t = 3.46, df = 5, p = 0.02) and Mutual Information (t = 4.42, df = 5, p = 0.007). The heuristics model gave a 60% improvement against ARACNe (p = 0.02) and CLR (p = 0.019). Analysis of Escherichia coli data suggests that the GRN discovery technique proposed is capable of identifying significant transcriptional regulatory interactions and the corresponding regulatory networks.
Description:
To operate enterprise activities, a large number of queries need to be processed every day through an enterprise system. Consequently, such a system frequently faces hugely overloaded information and incurs high delay in producing query responses for big data. This is because, traditional queries are normally treated with equal importance. With the advent of big data and its use in enterprise systems and the growth of process complexity, the traditional approach of query processing is no more suitable as it does not consider semantic information and captures all data irrespective of their relevance to a business organization, which eventually increases the computational time in both big data collection and analysis. The significance level of a query can make a trade-off between query response delay and the extent of data collection and analysis. This motivates us to concentrate on determining the significance level of a query considering its importance to an enterprise system. To our knowledge, no such approach is available in the literature. To bridge this research gap, this paper, for the first time, proposes an approach to determine the significance level of a query to prioritize them with the relevance to a business organization. As business processes play key roles in any enterprise system and all business processes are not equally important, this is done by determining the semantic similarity between a query and the processes of a business organization and the importance of a business process to that organization. With a case study on an enterprise system of a retail company, the results produced by our proposed approach have shown that significance level is higher for more important queries compared to the less important ones.
Description:
The transmission, storage and analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG) data in real-time is essential for remote patient monitoring with wearable ECG devices and mobile ECG contexts. However, this remains a challenge to achieve within the processing power and the storage capacity of mobile devices. ECG reduction algorithms have an important role to play in reducing the processing requirements for mobile devices, however many existing ECG reduction and compression algorithms are computationally expensive to execute in mobile devices and have not been designed for real-time computation and incremental data arrival. In this paper, we describe a computationally naive, yet effective, algorithm that achieves high ECG reduction rates while maintaining key diagnostic features including PR, QRS, ST, QT and RR intervals. While reduction does not enable ECG waves to be reproduced, the ability to transmit key indicators (diagnostic features) using minimal computational resources, is particularly useful in mobile health contexts involving power constrained sensors and devices. Results of the proposed reduction algorithm indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other ECG reduction algorithms at a reduction/compression ratio (CR) of 5:1. If power or processing capacity is low, the algorithm can readily switch to a compression ratio of up to 10: 1 while still maintaining an error rate below 10%.
Description:
The transmission, storage and analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG) data in real-time is essential for remote patient monitoring with wearable ECG devices and mobile ECG contexts. However, this remains a challenge to achieve within the processing power and the storage capacity of mobile devices. ECG reduction algorithms have an important role to play in reducing the processing requirements for mobile devices, however many existing ECG reduction and compression algorithms are computationally expensive to execute in mobile devices and have not been designed for real-time computation and incremental data arrival. In this paper, we describe a computationally naive, yet effective, algorithm that achieves high ECG reduction rates while maintaining key diagnostic features including PR, QRS, ST, QT and RR intervals. While reduction does not enable ECG waves to be reproduced, the ability to transmit key indicators (diagnostic features) using minimal computational resources, is particularly useful in mobile health contexts involving power constrained sensors and devices. Results of the proposed reduction algorithm indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other ECG reduction algorithms at a reduction/compression ratio (CR) of 5:1. If power or processing capacity is low, the algorithm can readily switch to a compression ratio of up to 10: 1 while still maintaining an error rate below 10%.
Description:
Cardiac health screening standards require increasingly more clinical tests consisting of blood, urine and anthropometric measures as well as an extensive clinical and medication history. To ensure optimal screening referrals, diagnostic determinants need to be highly accurate to reduce false positives and ensuing stress to individual patients. However, the data from individual patients partaking in population screening is often incomplete. The current study provides an imputation algorithm that has been applied to patientcentered cardiac health screening. Missing values are iteratively imputed in conjunction with combinations of values on subsets of selected features. The approach was evaluated on the DiabHealth dataset containing 2800 records with over 180 attributes. The results for predicting CVD after data completion showed sensitivity and specificity of 94% and 99% respectively. Removing variables that define cardiac events and associated conditions directly, left ‘age’ followed by ‘use’ of antihypertensive and anti-cholesterol medication, especially statins among the best predictors.