Healthcare is a $2 Trillion/year industry which amounts to 16% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. These numbers are expected to rapidly rise as the aging baby boomers will continue to increase the elderly age group population (people above 60 years of age) from the current 10% level to the 25% level in 2030. While the advances in hardware and software technologies for healthcare services have been remarkable, networking remains as the main hurdle in delivering much needed modern healthcare services in a timely and cost-effective manner.

This project pursues innovative wireless, wireline, and optical networking to support very high-throughput and mobile applications. In particular, the proposed networking will address ‘first-minute-healthcare-delivery’ to patients that require immediate medical diagnosis and treatment. For instance, a stroke patient should receive immediate medical monitoring and care based on advanced medical imaging and patient databases within the first minute of the crisis, even if the medical facilities are far away. This is made possible by combining gigabitwireless mesh networking on mobile ambulances and high-speed optical networking working seamlessly to achieve very high-throughput mobile networking. Considering that 92% of California’s landmass is rural, the benefit to the society from this new healthcare networking is immense.

2009 Update:

The first few minutes of the healthcare process is critical to survival and treatment of patients. Yet, medical procedures available in ambulances are basic and off-line. The proposed project addresses very high-throughput, real-time, and mobile networking that can support realtime interactive high definition visualization between ambulances and medical facilities. A heterogeneous high-speed reliable healthcare network with multiple access points is established by combining wireless mesh networking with optical wireline networking. Multi-hop relay connections will be formed among ambulances to avoid dense deployment of access points thus making the whole system cost efficient. In ambulance mesh network, to leverage the merits of centralized access control and distributed access control, we proposed a flow based transmission scheduling in order to eliminate intra-flow contention and inter-flow interference. The flow based transmission scheduling enable us to utilize the bandwidth resource efficiently while avoiding synchronization requirement. To reduce control overhead and avoid large propagation delay between access points and ambulances, we developed a token based data packet relaying scheme. A bi-directional transmission scheme based on network coding is also developed to increase resource utilization. To maintain network-wide load balancing, we propose Autonomous Network management with Team learning based Self-configuration (ANTS) which attempts to manage a feasible route for traffic flow with QoS constraints in heterogeneous networks. To enable cognitive intelligence for network-wide load balancing, we implement a cross-layer mechanism in which learning agents in middleware layer can monitor network status in other layers, thereby allowing for the discovery of optimal routes.

By adopting the proposed network system, sufficient information about patients will be delivered to the hospital to enable the real-time online healthcare collaboration between first-responders on the ambulance and the hospital personnel, so that a lot more critical decisions and treatments can be made before the ambulance returns to the hospital. In addition to the healthcare application, the proposed techniques can also be applied in other large scale mobile environments to enable time-critical information exchanging and sharing among parties far away, such as battle field and disaster rescue.