Information Technology and Health

Abstract— Over the past few years, the use of information technology has become a vital ingredient for continuous success of hospitals and health care industry. The information technology does not only support the patients during their stay in hospital, but also help them in assessing their health on personal and continuous basis. Some of the most recent applications include monitoring patients using the wireless sensor networks. The paper discusses the use of information technology gadgets for health care and ethical consideration for hospitals which deploy information technology infrastructure for providing quality health care to the patients.

Keywords-information technology; wireless sensor network; ethics

Introduction

Over the past few years, various information and communication technologies have been used for providing health care services to the patients. The information technology is widely in use by hospitals and clinics, for facilitating patients with electronic health record management, and online health information. As technology advances, it creates some issues in addition to providing benefits. The case is same with the introduction of information technology in health care sector; where ethical considerations arise.

Remote or local monitoring of patients with chronic diseases is one of the most important areas which have been tackled with the help of information technology. Wireless sensor networks can be considered as the most emerging area due to its applications for health care industry. The paper discusses and compares some of the common technologies and gadgets used for health monitoring; wireless sensor networks can be seen to be embedded in most of these health care equipments.

Rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the use of various wireless senor based technologies and gadgets for patient health monitoring. Section III describes the use of information technology by the hospitals. Section IV describes the ethical considerations which the management of hospital should take care about. Finally, section V concludes the paper.

Wireless Sensor Networks Based Gadgets

Wireless Sensors and networks have the capability to provide extensive benefits to the patients, as well as the health care providers [1]. Some of the major applications of these networks include local and remote monitoring of patients. In the following, some of the health care gadgets based on WSN's are discussed.

2net Platform

This platform is designed to provide wireless health care solutions using cloud computing technologies. Using 2net platform, it is possible to store and transfer the biometric health data to various databases or portals. The major advantage of 2net platform is the increased degree of security and reliability associated with the data transfer. The cloud technologies make this platform to be universally interoperable and can be integrated to a wide range of medical applications and devices. It is extremely easy to transfer data from medical device to the 2net platform over blue tooth/wi-fi connection. Figure 1 shows the process of data transfer.

Figure 1: Transferring Data to 2net Platform

Mobile Cardiac Outpatient Telemetry™ (MCOT™)

The Cardiac Outpatient Telemetry unit provides the patients with the facilities of continuous monitoring with the small sensors to be worn ...