SIMULATION

This paper describes a discrete event simulation study of an emergency department at Dr. Georges-L. Dumont Hospital in Moncton (Canada). The objective of the study was to reduce patient waiting times and to improve overall service delivery and system throughput. As patient waiting times are linked to resource availability, a number of alternatives were designed based on adding resource scenarios. Model development was made using Arena software.

Computer models of the heart have become useful tools in improving understanding of cardiac electrical activation at the cellular level, and in analyzing mechanisms of arrhythmias and antiarrhythmic therapies. In this paper, we propose to use spherical harmonic (SPHARM) surface reconstruction and alignment methods to generate curvilinear meshes for finite element models of ventricular anatomy which incorporate detailed structural information. The endocardial and epicardial surfaces are defined by SPHARM, and the volume between these surfaces is divided into nested shells. Consequently, the resulting mesh comprises hexahedral elements. Using this novel SPHARM-based meshing method, the transmembrane potential propagation is simulated, based on FitzHugh—Nagumo reaction—diffusion equations. The dynamic electrical activation propagations are simulated on realistic cardiac data during a heart cycle. The obtained results clearly demonstrate an accurate resolution of the cardiac potential during the excitation. Our novel curvilinear mesh models have a great potential to be used in an improved simulation of cardiovascular pathologies for testing therapy strategies and planning interventions.

The present paper studies the prospective and the performance of a forthcoming high-speed third-generation (3G) networking technology called High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) for delivering emergency m-health applications. The joint transmission of voice, real-time video, medical data such as electrocardiogram, vital signals, heart sound and file transfer is performed for both uplink and downlink. Various scenarios are involved in terms of emergency situations in random locations, where no other system but 3G is available. The accomplishment of quality of service (QoS) is explored through a step-by-step improvement of HSPA systems parameters, incorporating admission and congestion control elements and the use of prioritization for m-health services. HSPA managed to meet the requirements for emergency m-health scenarios and adequately served the generated load.

Next generation wireless networks have been designed to provide support for multimedia services, with different traffic characteristics and different Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Medical broadband applications have attracted increased attention in recent years and furthermore, the tremendous growth of wireless technologies has introduced the potential of continuous healthcare monitoring for mobile patients. The bandwidth requirements and the emergency nature of medical applications introduce the need for QoS provisioning in wireless broadband medical networks. Wireless networks may support a number of e-health applications with different traffic requirements and characteristics, providing at the same time QoS guarantees. Resource allocation in e-health application is inherently different in many aspects including the offered services, traffic requirements, propagation characteristics, and network structure. In this paper, an adaptive resource allocation scheme for QoS provisioning in wireless healthcare information systems is proposed.