A Multi-Constraint Scheme with Authorized Mechanism for the Patient Safety.

Many research works have attempted to introduce passive RFID technology into medical systems to reduce medical errors. However, most of these proposed works focused on identifying patients and objects. If an RFID based medical system is only good for identifying patients and medical objects but not capable of halting any medical process immediately, then it is not possible to prevent medical errors from happening. Our research focuses on a mechanism to detect and to avoid medical harm before it occurs to patients. In this paper, we propose to incorporate multiple-constraints into the authorization scheme and used this scheme as a basis for implementing a medical management system avoiding medical errors to assist medical staff. Specifically, our scheme ensures that a medical operation is if and only if enabled when the constraints are being satisfied that an "identified patient" is being treated by a "certified medical staff member" within an "authorized area". In practical environments, our authorization scheme can be applied to various healthcare applications, and we develop a prototype system and test it in three applications: X-ray control, specimen collection, and blood transfusion management. The experimental results show that the system can be used to enable X-ray when the X-ray is in authorized location and operated by authorized operator. For the specimen collection and blood transfusion, the logs showing which medical staff has done specimen or blood transfusion on which patient at authorized location are correctly recorded into Hospital Information System (HIS). The locating process can be performed within 10 to 20 seconds, and the locating error is less than 2 meters.

A Context-Aware Interactive Health Care System Based on Ontology and Fuzzy Inference.

In the present society, most families are double-income families, and as the long-term care is seriously short of manpower, it contributes to the rapid development of tele-homecare equipment, and the smart home care system gradually emerges, which assists the elderly or patients with chronic diseases in daily life. This study aims at interaction between persons under care and the system in various living spaces, as based on motion-sensing interaction, and the context-aware smart home care system is proposed. The system stores the required contexts in knowledge ontology, including the physiological information and environmental information of the person under care, as the database of decision. The motion-sensing device enables the person under care to interact with the system through gestures. By the inference mechanism of fuzzy theory, the system can offer advice and rapidly execute service, thus, implementing the EHA. In addition, the system is integrated with the functions of smart phone, tablet PC, and PC, in order that users can implement remote operation and share information regarding the person under care. The health care system constructed in this study enables the decision making system to probe into the health risk of each person under care; then, from the view of preventive medicine, and through a composing system and simulation experimentation, tracks the physiological trend of the person under care, and provides early warning service, thus, promoting smart home care.

Low cost RFID real lightweight binding proof protocol for medication errors and patient safety.

An Institute of Medicine Report stated there are 98,000 people annually who die due to medication related errors in the United States, and hospitals and other medical institutions are thus being pressed to use technologies to reduce such errors. One approach is to provide a suitable protocol that can cooperate with low cost RFID tags in order to identify patients. However, existing low cost RFID tags lack computational power and it is almost impossible to equip them with security functions, such as keyed hash function. To address this issue, a so a real lightweight binding proof protocol is proposed in this paper. The proposed protocol uses only logic gates (e.g. AND, XOR, ADD) to achieve the goal of proving that two tags exist in the field simultaneously, without the need for any complicated security algorithms. In addition, various scenarios are provider to explain the process of adopting this binding proof protocol with regard to guarding patient safety and preventing medication errors.

Dual function seal: visualized digital signature for electronic medical record systems.

Digital signature is an important cryptography technology to be used to provide integrity and non-repudiation in electronic medical record systems (EMRS) and it is required by law. However, digital signatures normally appear in forms unrecognizable to medical staff, this may reduce the trust from medical staff that is used to the handwritten signatures or seals. Therefore, in this paper we propose a dual function seal to extend user trust from a traditional seal to a digital signature. The proposed dual function seal is a prototype that combines the traditional seal and digital seal. With this prototype, medical personnel are not just can put a seal on paper but also generate a visualized digital signature for electronic medical records. Medical Personnel can then look at the visualized digital signature and directly know which medical personnel generated it, just like with a traditional seal. Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is used as an image processing method to generate a visualized digital signature, and the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is calculated to verify that distortions of all converted images are beyond human recognition, and the results of our converted images are from 70 dB to 80 dB. The signature recoverability is also tested in this proposed paper to ensure that the visualized digital signature is verifiable. A simulated EMRS is implemented to show how the visualized digital signature can be integrity into EMRS.