ENABLING TETHERLESS CARE WITH CONTEXT-AWARENESS AND OPPORTUNISTIC COMMUNICATION
P. J. Dillon · D-Scholarship@Pitt (University of Pittsburgh) · 2014
Tetherless care is a novel healthcare delivery paradigm that enables an interaction between caregivers and patients beyond the confines of traditional points of care. This thesis presents a synthesis of recent advances in wearable, ubiquitous sensing; mobile computing; wireless networks; and health information technology into a cohesive framework that enables and supports the tetherless care concept. Tetherless care is formally defined and modeled in a higher order logical framework. The model distills three relations between several classes in the model's domain of discourse. A prototype implementation is developed and evaluated to capture and represent the logical classes of tetherless care and provide the development infrastructure upon which the relational logic outlined by the model can be implemented. An algorithm is presented and evaluated to support the delivery of traffic between mobile devices and servers despite intermittent connectivity given the changing urgency of the patient's situation. And an example tetherless care application is presented, developed for the framework, and compared with its deployment on a similar platform. Results show that contemporary mobile devices supply sufficient power to support 24 hours of operation and that, at least, some patient environments provide sufficient opportunities for connectivity to reliably meet the demands of some tetherless care applications, ultimately leading to a conclusion of proof-of-concept for tetherless care.