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INTRODUCTION

Formally ubiquitous computing is defined as "machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs." This paradigm is also described as pervasive computing, artificial intelligence., The various computing technologies have been evolving continuously penetrating far and wide and increasingly influencing almost every aspect of our day-to-day life.

The rapidly advancing technology has blessed us with a host of versatile devices to make our life easier. The invention of equipments like abacus, transistor, ENIAC, PC, mobile phone etc defined new and higher levels of sophistication, use, and comfort for the human life.

The revolution unleashed by the massive penetration of cellular mobile phones has made it a community device like the radio. This was made possible by the tremendous growth in the new computation paradigm called PERVASIVE COMPUTING. This approach envisions a conglomeration of small smart devices like sensors, signal conditioners, wearable computers, mobile phones, notebook computers, hand-helds, PDA s etc seamlessly integrated and scattered in the environment. The ultimate goal is to enable ANY TIME ANY WHERE computing. And with the advent of Internet, the World Wide Web, and other networking technologies, instant communication and transmission of data were made possible, shrinking the world and bringing the people across the globe close together transcending geographic barriers.

2. PERVASIVE COMPUTING

The goal of pervasive computing, which combines current network technologies with wireless technologies, voice recognition, internet capability and artificial intelligence, is to create an environment where the connectivity of devices is embedded in such a way that the connectivity is unconstructive and always available. It is a numerous, causally accessible, often invisible devices. It makes a computer so natural that we use it without even thinking about it. It provides access to relevant information and applications through a new class of ubiquitous, intelligent appliances that have the ability to easily function when and where needed. We envision an explosion of interconnected small devices from watches to cars that make our lives easier and more productive. A parallel revolution lays in the network-enabling these pervasive computing devices by providing transparent, ubiquitous access to e-business services. In general, it is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Pervasive means spreading widely throughout an area or a group of people.

Pervasive health care focuses explicitly on the use of pervasive computing technology for developing tools and procedures that put the patient at the center of the health care process. From a technological stand point it includes remote monitoring, remote consultation, and assistive technologies

Fig1.Pictorial overview of the pervasive health care scenario

This has opened up exciting possibilities in the health care sector both in terms of diagnostic equipments and communication devices. Now tele-medicine systems have sufficiently advanced so as to relay the medical data over large distances within a reasonable delay. Attempts are being made to develop intelligent wearable computers that can perform a primary diagnosis.

Anytime/anywhere--->any device--->any network--->any data.

Any time: 7 days X 24 hours, global, ubiquitous access

Any device: pc, PDA, cell phone and so forth.

Any network: access, notification, data synchronization, queued transactions, wireless optimization, security, content adaptation, development tools, device and user management

Any data: e-mail, personal information manager, inter-intranet, public services Imagine a world filled with all sorts of electronic devices - traditional desktop computers, wireless laptops, small PDAS, smart cell phones, tiny wristwatch pagers, clever little coffee pots. You have just imagined the future of Pervasive Computing (PvC).

Pervasive health care focuses explicitly on the use of pervasive computing technology for developing tools and procedures that put the patient at the center of the health care process. From a technological stand point it includes remote monitoring, remote consultation, and assistive technologies

Open standards have to be established which are prepared to face the demands of the described manifold and differentiated devices. New standards like WAP, Bluetooth have been created by large cross-industry initiatives, defining the necessary communication protocols as well as the underlying physical connections. The Internet has evolved to be the backbone of worldwide private and public networks.

3. PRINCIPLES
The basic principles of pervasive computing are

3.1 DECENTRALISATION:

The shift from a centralized view to a strongly decentralized computing landscape is the first paradigm of pervasive computing. Pervasive computing distributes the responsibilities between the variety of small devices, each of which take over specific tasks and functionality. The ability to use applications and information on mobile devices and synchronize any updates with network based systems or other devices is a new task arising from that decentralization. Pervasive devices and applications are often embedded into a service infrastructure, like a cellular phone network. Decentralization makes it necessary for service providers to administer their deployed software and deliver updates to the customers device from remote.

3.2. DIVERSIFICATION:

Pervasive computing introduces an entirely new view of functionality: there is a clear move from universal computers challenging performance, price and functionality to diversified devices which aim at best meeting the requirements of a specific group of users for a specific purpose.

The new gadgets appearing in these days in association with pervasive computing, such as WAP phones, screen phones, or handheld computers, offer only a highly customized functionality for a particular application context. Applications are a seamless integration of software and hardware. They are intended to be used in a specific situation and optimized for that environment. One major challenge arising from the increasing diversity is how to manage the different capabilities of those manifold devices. Each delivery platform has its own characteristics making it difficult to provide common applications. A major requirement is integrating all this technology to deliver real solutions to users.

3.3. CONNECTIVITY:
The third paradigm of pervasive computing is the strong demand towards connectivity. Manifold devices are seamlessly integrated in an IT world without boundaries. Handheld computer collaborates in the cellular phone via infrared in order to synchronize data over a wireless network. Alternatively, the same handheld can connect via serial port to a LAN.

3.4. SIMPLICITY: Pervasive devices are very specialized tools that are not optimized for general use. They perform the task for which they have been designed very well from a usability point of view. These lines up with the fourth paradigm of pervasive computing; aiming at simplicity of usage. The magic words are availability, convenience, and ease of use. Information access and

management must be applicable without spending significant time learning how to use technology. While proper selection and education of user groups was required to manage the complexity of traditional computer systems, pervasive computers are intuitive to use and might not even require the reading of a manual. Pervasive computing postulates a holistic approach: Hardware and software should be seamlessly integrated and target the very specific needs of and end-user. Providing all these in a small and cheap device is definitely a challenging task for developers.

The Proposed Approach:

In this paper authors propose anew mechanism for the detection of silent heart attacks and providing an alert.. The silent heart attack belongs to the high risk category. since this does not trigger any visible indications unlike an ordinary heart attacks, it could often be fatal and usually goes unnoticed. The only fool- proof method of deleting this is by observing the deviation in the ECG (Electro Cardiogram) pattern.

But this data after reception must again has to be analyzed by doctors (which of course is a manual process), in order to make the diagnosis. This could prove to be too slow in dealing with crises like silent heart attacks where an immediate diagnosis and care delivery is a paramount importance. Fortunately computation technology has advanced to provide us with small wearable devices with integrated sensors for cardiac monitoring.

The proposed scheme envisions wearable diagnostic unit which will continuously monitor the heart checking for abnormality. This is done based on template matching procedure. Instead of storing the entire pattern it stores the data related to the abnormality alone. The detection generates a trigger signal which is picked up by the patients mobile phone., and it causes a predefined message to be sent to a predefined number such as doctors mobile phone automatically without alerting the patient and causing panic. This communication process can be suitably enhanced like alerting the nearest or any chosen hospital by an automated call. 7

4. PERVASIVE HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS

Fig2. Pervasive healthcare system in hospitals

Beyond pure technology the issue of convincing real life applications is increasingly becoming a central topic in the field of Pervasive Computing. Here the area of health and healthcare has emerged as a promising domain. So called Pervasive Healthcare Systems encompasses a broad range of topics such as advanced hospital information and logistics systems, mobile health monitoring, assisted living for the elderly and the handicapped, and lifestyle and wellness related personal systems.

The demographic trend towards a more elderly society and the rising healthcare costs lead to a strong demand for solutions that provide adequate care at affordable cost. Furthermore consumers are increasingly health conscious and looking for lifestyle, wellness and health related products.

As promising as it is as an application domain, the field of Pervasive Healthcareis scientifically and technologically highly challenging. Healthcare applications involve complex processes often within strict regulatory constraints. Reliability, security and privacy are central to many applications. In addition since the systems are often closely integrated with the users everyday activities and relate to very private issues subtle, human computer interaction issues play an important role in the system design.

The behavior of a composer is specified in a nonprocedural manner, using building blocks that interact with both passive and active providers of input context information. The nonprocedural approach frees the application developer from timing concerns, freeing her to concentrate on the logical mapping from lower-level context information to higher-level composed information.

The primary function of the Intelligent Notification System(INS) is to deliver a message to users in the most convenient fashion. We envision the use of current context information both to deliver messages to users fulfilling a particular role, and to determine the best medium for delivering a message to a particular recipient. In the case of context information originating and changing at some distant source, we need some general mechanism that can subscribe to the changing values, and block awaiting their arrival. dynamically, once on initial page load, and as context changes arrived.

5. PERVASIVE DEVICES (SENSORS)

A brief glance at some important wearable cardiac devices is listed below.

Fig3.LC circuit based sensor

Fig4. Force sensing resistors

5.1. Cardiac Holter:

Named after its inventor, Dr. Norman J. Holter is a portable device for continuously monitoring the electrical activity of the heart Holter monitor records electrical signals from the heart via a series of electrodes attached to the chest. The number and position of electrodes varies by model, but most Holter monitors employ from three to eight. These electrodes are connected to a small piece of equipment that is attached to the patient's belt, and is responsible for keeping a log of the heart's electrical activity throughout the recording period... This data is later downloaded to a PC and examined as an ECG pattern and analyzed using analysis software.

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The software gives a visual indication of any abnormality. A set of templates of ECG patterns have been derived and they serve as a reference.

5.2. Vita phone Hertz handy:

This is a complete system for patients to measure an ECG signal and transmit the data to a central location called service center for analysis and further processing. A panic button is provided which on being pressed sends an alarm signal to the service center along with the patient's current GPS position.

5.3 Welch allyn Micropaq:

It supports multi parameter monitoring like ECG display, heart rate, patient alarms, etc and also alarm messages from an Acuity Central Station. It extends patient care by providing patient alarms when it is out of range or not connected to the wireless network. The Micropaq can be integrated into wireless Ethernet Local Area Networks.

5.4 E-san:
This is for asthma monitoring. This uses a combination of electronic peak flow meter and a PDA handset which transmits the readings to a central server over a GPRS connection. It also has an integrated monitoring device for diabetics.

5.5 Amon:
Amon is a wrist mounted device which acquires signals such as heart rate, skin perspiration, body temperature etc and transmit these data to a remote tele-medicine center.

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The recording done by these devices must always be analyzed only by a qualified technician or a doctor; this is a huge overhead for the professionals considering the number of patients they attend to in a hugely populous country like India. If you need an immediate diagnosis this approach too proves to be inadequate. In high risk cases you need to make the diagnosis on the fly instantaneously.

The notification component provides the application developer with convenient, context based facilities for communicating application information to people. Other business logic may be present, including components that interact with applications and data in other tiers. We also show a database management system in the figure, since effective use of context information may require access to more static, conventional data.

Although the architecture is generic, we used specific IBM products and research prototypes for the portal infrastructure and the context-awareness, privacy, and notification middle ware .For definiteness, the description that follows includes details of the particular components we used. This architecture exploits a number of mechanisms available directly in enterprise servers such as Web Sphere [5]and Web Sphere Portal Server (WPS) [6].

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6. PERVASIVE COMPUTING - A LIFE SAVING TOOL

The silent heart attack belongs to the high risk category. Since this does not trigger any visible indications unlike an ordinary heart attack, it could often be fatal and usually goes unnoticed. The only fool- proof method of detecting this is by observing the deviation in the ECG (Electro cardiogram) pattern. But this data after reception must again has to be analyzed by doctors in order to make the diagnosis. This could prove to be too slow in dealing with crises like silent heart attacks where an immediate diagnosis and care delivery is of paramount importance. Fortunately computation technology has advanced to provide us with small wearable devices with integrated sensors for cardiac monitoring.

Fig5.Cardiac monitoring system

The proposed scheme envisions a wearable diagnostic unit which will continuously monitor the heart checking for abnormality. This is done based on a template matching procedure. Instead of storing the entire pattern it stores the data related to the abnormality alone. The detection generates a trigger signal which is picked up by the patient's mobile phone, and it causes a predefined message to be sent to a predefined number such as the doctor's mobile phone automatically without alerting the patient and causing panic. This communication process can be suitably enhanced like alerting the nearest or any chosen hospital by an automated call.

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Fig6. Diagrammatic representation of the healthcare system architecture

The first part is the wearable diagnostic unit and has the following components.

i. A transducer unit in order to pick up the electrical pulses of the heart.

ii. A conditioner: This will extract the data relevant to heart attack.

iii. Template: The templates will store the reference values with which the output of the conditioner will be matched. The template will be customized to suit the patients condition based on parameters like age, sex, history of attacks and anonymous conditions. This template will be set based on a doctors consultation and it can be changed or updated regularly.

iv. Trigger generator: In the case of any abnormality this trigger generator will generate a signal which can be picked up by a mobile phone or PDA so that the alert can be relayed to a care provider. 14

7. IMPLEMENTATION

A patient with sensor in his wrist

Internet PDA

Hospital Server

Patients Relative

Doctors Personal Mobile

Fig.Pictorial representation for implementation of pervasive computing

ARCHITECTURE
As we considered the overall architecture (see Fig. 1)required for a s ystem to implement First, the we t ype of scenariodescribed a modern, would above, we made

somassumptions. application and

assumedthat

web -based, to

multi -tier provide a

development

environment

continue

viablebase for the future system. These environments provide enduseraccess onl y through webbrowsers (the first tier), whoseHTTP interactions are with a web and application server(the second tier), connected further with back -end 15

enterpriseapplications and databases (in one or more tiers). To providefor identification, authentication, and customization by theuser, we further assumed the web server was in fact a portal server, as is increasingly common in many enterprises. End users authenticate and connect to the portal with a conventional browser, and can customize and arrange the portlets to which they are granted access. A portlet is a small application component displayed as part of a single browserpage. One or more portlets cooperate to provide a logical pervasive computing application. In general, the portlets display information that changes dynamically, or in response toexplicit user-interface events from the user. Dynamic changesrequire some active component in the browser, typically involvinga Java applet, JavaScript, or a similar technology.

Fig. . Architecture of Enterprise Pervasive-Computing Applications PDAs have different form factors, display sizes, and user interfaces than larger computers. However, we assume they run full browsers that can initiate secure portal sessions, provide JavaScript access to the browsers document object model, and execute Java applets. Browser technology and PDA capacities are improving steadily, so we feel the assumption is not overly constraining. In addition to this assumption on the browser execution environment, we assume portlet developers will everage tools for multi-device authoring to enable access from a range of devices. User-interface events in the portal are handled by servlets running in the execution context of the web server (the second tier).

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For the purposes of Fig. 1, we imagine only presentation logic in the servlets , while business logic is the responsibility of the third-tier application. The third tier is the core of the contextaware application. Sensors, either hardware or software, generate raw data that is presented by the context middleware to context-aware business logic. This process includes any controls on privacy mandated externally or by the application. The notification component provides the application developer with convenient, context based facilities for communicating application information to people. Other business logic may be present, including components that interact with applications and data in other tiers. We also show a database management system in the figure, since effective use of context information may require access to more static, conventional data. Although the architecture is generic, we used specific IBM products and research prototypes for the portal infrastructure and the contextawareness, privacy, and notification middle ware .For definiteness, the description that follows includes details of the particular components we used. This architecture exploits a number of mechanisms available directly in enterprise servers such as Web Sphere [5]and Web Sphere Portal Server (WPS) [6]. For example, we assumed that an enterprise directory, connected to the web server, would allow us to handle all issues of identification ,authentication, authorization, and encryption with standard mechanisms in WPS. WebSphere provides a fully managed application environment for Java servlets and enterprise Javabeans, including transaction management and database access. It also has transcoding and device-specific functionality that would be applied to the multiplicity of devices used to interact with the system. Because we use browser technology, no other client software would need to be deployed on the devices. The components for context acquisition and analysis (Context Weaver [1]), context-based notification (INS [7]), and policybased secure access to sensitive context information (CPE [8]) are all recent IBM products or prototypes. We describe each of them briefly. Context Weaver is a platform for writing contextaware applications, and is extensible, scalable, and reusable. It separates the concerns of accessing pervasive data from the concerns of aggregating and analyzing it. All sources of context information registered with a Context Weaver installation provide data to applications through a simple, uniform, XML-based interface. Applications access data sources not by 17

naming particular providers of the data, but by describing the kind of data they need, and Context Weaver searches for an available source of such data. If the source fails, Context Weaver automatically rebinds the application to another provider of the same kind of data, if there is one. Providers of context information include not only devices, services, and databases external to Context Weaver, but also programmed entities called composers, which compose context information from other data providers. Context Weaver applications use composers and external sources of context information interchangeably. The behavior of a composer is specified in a nonprocedural manner, using building blocks that interact with both passive and active providers of input context information. The nonprocedural approach frees the application developer from timing concerns, freeing her to concentrate on the logical mapping from lower-level context information to higher-level composed information. The primary function of the Intelligent Notification System(INS) is to deliver a message to users in the most convenient fashion. We envision the use of current context information both to deliver messages to users fulfilling a particular role, and to determine the best medium for delivering a message to a particular recipient. In the case of context information originating and changing at some distant source, we need some general mechanism that can subscribe to the changing values, and block awaiting their arrival. dynamically, once on initial page load, and as context changes arrived.

Advantages of pervasive computing:

>Reduced cost of current tasks. >Increased quality of care. >Assistive technology. >Reduced risk for common activities. >Unimagined applications

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8. FUTURE

It is difficult to predict the future evolution in a rapidly changing environment. Almost every business process involving people will integrate pervasive computing into marketing and delivery channels. Highly personalized services and the ability to control communication and services via easy to use interfaces are key to gaining acceptance. Mobile communication and the Internet are converging into an overall mobile

8.1.CONCLUSION:

Pervasive computing in an increasingly networked world continues to affect more and more of the world's population. More questions than answers remain, more investment required than profit currently available, but plenty of opportunity and revolutionary benefits (and potential pitfalls) for everyone who participates. Although this is a global phenomenon, regional and national social and cultural factors will directly influence the technologies and promise of pervasive computing.

Pervasive computing is quite a bit different, because it assumes a distributed environment model. It has the potential to dramatically alter how people use devices to connect and communicate in everyday life. In this paper, we have described the implementation of pervasive computing in medicine as a life saving tool. Thus, we stand at the beginning of yet another era in computers pervasive era.

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9. REFERENCES

a) Pervasive Computing, by Uwe Hansmann, Lothar Merk, Martin S. Nicklous, Thomas Stober

b) Pervasive Computing Technology and Architecture of Mobile and Internet applications, Jochen Burkhardt, Dr. Horst Henn, Stefan Hepper, Klaus Rintdorff, Thomas Schack

c) Pervasive Computing in Health Care Jacob, E. Bardram, Alex Mihalidis, Dadong Wan Published 2006, CRC Press

d) Mobile Medicine : hand helds used to treat disease Dueul. R Pervasive Computing IEEE, Volume1, Issue2, Apr-Jun 2002

e) A Low Power Linear Phase Digital FIR Filter for Wearable ECG Devices Young Lian, Jianghong Yu, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2005. IEEE-EMBS 2005. 27th Annual International Conference of the Volume , Issue , 2005

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