IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine最新文献

In this article, a MELP-based real-time system that produces synthetic speech for patients with chronic dysphonia while preserving their continual structure of speech, was presented. Dysphonic patients, even though strained, could express themselves within face-to-face communications. However, when speaking in a group or using communication devices such as mobile phones, they face serious difficulties in vocal communication since it becomes harder to understand their speech. This system will make the speech of such a patient much more understandable by reconstructing the patients' dysphonic speech in real time. This system can easily be fitting into an embedded system of the size and shape of a mobile phone, so that it could be carried all the time by the patients.

Most clinics rely on the appointment scheduling systems to manage patients' access to their health-care providers. Conventional appointment scheduling processes have intrinsic inefficiency because of the tendency to generate fragmented time slots. In this article, a solution, which considers patient-provider mutual preference, is provided to guide the appointment scheduling process by means of schedule defragmentation. Computer simulation shows that patient-provider cooperation can effectively reduce schedule fragmentation, yielding higher appointment acceptance rate and clinic time utilization rate at given appointment demand matched by service supply. When service time distribution can be accurately estimated, decreasing unit time slot size may further improve the appointment scheduling efficiency. In addition, a clinical survey was conducted to identify the opportunities and challenges of applying the proposed defragmentation method in clinical appointment scheduling practice.

This paper investigates the use of clustering technique to characterize the providers of maintenance services in a health-care institution according to their performance. A characterization of the inventory of equipment from seven pilot areas was carried out first (including 264 medical devices). The characterization study concluded that the inventory on a whole is old [exploitation time (ET)/useful life (UL) average is 0.78] and has high maintenance service costs relative to the original cost of acquisition (service cost /acquisition cost average 8.61%). A monitoring of the performance of maintenance service providers was then conducted. The variables monitored were response time (RT), service time (ST), availability, and turnaround time (TAT). Finally, the study grouped maintenance service providers into clusters according to performance. The study grouped maintenance service providers into the following clusters. Cluster 0: Identified with the best performance, the lowest values of TAT, RT, and ST, with an average TAT value of 1.46 days; Clusters 1 and 2: Identified with the poorest performance, highest values of TAT, RT, and ST, and an average TAT value of 9.79 days; and Cluster 3: Identified by medium-quality performance, intermediate values of TAT, RT, and ST, and an average TAT value of 2.56 days.

The various components of the artificial pancreas puzzle are being put into place. Features such as communication, control, modeling, and learning are being realized presently. Steps have been set in motion to carry the conceptual design through simulation to clinical implementation. The challenging pieces still to be addressed include stress and exercise; as integral parts of the ultimate goal, effort has begun to shift toward overcoming the remaining hurdles to the full artificial pancreas. The artificial pancreas is close to becoming a reality, driven by technology, and the expectation that lives will be improved.

Phototherapy is the standard treatment for severe cases of hyperbilirubinemia in newborns. Phototherapy exposes the infants to light in the range of 400-500 nm to isomerize unconjugated bilirubin in the skin. Any light source that produces this wavelength can be used, including the sun (though there is a risk of sunburn), fluorescent or halogen lamps, or, more recently, light-emitting diodes. Despite the well-established efficacy of phototherapy devices and their relative simplicity-being not much more than a floor lamp-phototherapy devices are too expensive for developing world hospitals to purchase, with typical hospital models ranging from US$3,000 to US$5,000. In addition, the resource-poor setting presents a more challenging engineering problem than most. Phototherapy devices are frequently donated to developing world hospitals. However, donated phototherapy devices typically run for no more than a few months once donated and, even then, offer little value to some hospitals. Given this background, we set out to design a phototherapy device specifically for use in the developing world. As a minimum, we knew that it had to have a light source with an extraordinarily long life span and have battery backup so that it could run during frequent power outages. Our design uses LEDs and is powered by a car or motorcycle battery. In this article, we present the full engineering design cycle, staring with needs identification and continuing through several cycles of engineering field trials and results with comments on the differences between the engineering design cycle executed in, and for, the developing world.

Multiple studies suggest that the level of patient care may decline in the future because of a larger aging population and medical staff shortages. Wireless sensing systems that automate some of the patient monitoring tasks can potentially improve the efficiency of patient workflows, but their efficacy in clinical settings is an open question. This article examines the potential of wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies to improve the efficiency of the patient-monitoring process in clinical environments. MEDiSN, a WSN designed to continuously monitor the vital signs of ambulatory patients, is designed. The usefulness of MEDiSN is validated with test bed experiments and results from a pilot study performed at the Emergency Department, Johns Hopkins Hospital. Promising results indicate that MEDiSN can tolerate high degrees of human mobility, is well received by patients and staff members, and performs well in real clinical environments.

In this article, the challenges of simultaneous respiratory gas concentration and flow measurements in a breathing circuit are reviewed. The tradeoffs that were considered in the development of a clinically useful on-airway combination CO(2)/flow sensor are discussed as well as the applications enabled by this on-airway combination CO(2)/flow sensor.

Technology transfer has served the field of biomedical engineering well. Although the process is fraught with obstacles and may appear to be a distraction from more important work in the laboratory, application of technology is crucial to the furthering of the field and to public health in general. A given inventor may not want to take over the administrative tasks of protecting IP, developing a regulatory strategy, and developing a business model, and he or she does not necessarily have to; however, the inventor needs to at least know about the strategies and know there are people to turn to for leadership and guidance outside of the laboratory early in the process. And that can be all an inventor wants to do or can do: to simply turn the invention over to someone else and move on to more research in the hopes that the invention will help improve patients' health and perhaps afford the inventor and the research institution some financial reward. However, in turning an invention over completely, an inventor also loses power over how, for whom, and at what price the invention will be offered, and that is a reason to become more informed about the process, to know what you can ask for, and to stand by your invention's side in whatever capacity you are equipped to do so throughout the entire technology transfer process.