Motivation

The motivation for creating the eSana framework is to have a platform in order to create small mobile applications in the health environment. It consists mainly of two parts:

1. The mobile device is used by patients or doctors in order to view, create or modify information. It also serves as a communication relaying entity that gathers information from the surrounding area using personal area networks (e.g. Bluetooth).
2. The server receives the information and sends them to the subscribed services. This enables a decoupling of the mobile application from the (yet unknown) services that will use the data generated by the users.

Introduction

The eSana framework considers the needs of several actors, e.g. patient, doctors, nurses, health care administrators, by enabling various scenarios. One scenario is the transmission of physiological parameters. Several medical devices used at the home of a patient transmit their values to his or her personal mobile device (typically a cellphone) using a Wireless Personal Area Network such as Bluetooth. The mobile device acts as a Mobile Base Unit (MBU) and interfaces to the Internet after transformating the information. Additionally, the application on the MBU allows to query further discrete information from the patient (e.g. whether or not the user already had lunch). A screenshot of a diabetes patient’s user interface utilized for transmitting glucose values is illustrated below. This additional information can be defined by the supporting doctor in order to personalize the whole application to the medical condition of the patient. Internally, the user interface is automatically generated by XML documents that are updated regularly, if necessary.

Once the patient decides to send the data, a Web Service is invoked on the eSanaServer. This server transforms the information and dispatches it to a number of interested subscribers (in this case, a statistical service that can be accessed by the patient’s doctor). Other scenarios include the additional subscription of an alerting service for diabetes patients that analyzes the data and warns the doctor immediately, if the values exceed a defined threshold. In order to comply to the mobility needs of the doctor, both the statistical server and the alerting service allow access from a mobile device.

Example of generated user interface

Component Diagram

Application Scenarios

Possible cases in which the eSana framework may be used are and have been elaborated in a number of master thesis and publications:

• Support of diabetes patients that use a mobile application to introduce their data, both in rural areas or cities.
• Support of cardiology patients that use a portable ECG device together with a mobile device to measure their ECGs in various circumstances.
• Support of health professionals (e.g. nurses) to take pictures from dermatology patients and send them to specialists that evaluate an uncertain condition.

Publications

• Marco Savini, Joël Vogt, Daniel Wenger: Using the eSana Framework in Dermatology to improve the Information Flow between Patients and Doctors, Presented at the Bled eConference 2008, Bled, Slovenia, June 2008.
  Download paper (PDF, 951 KB)
• Marco Savini, Henrik Stormer, Andreas Meier: Integrating Context Information in a Mobile Environment using the eSana Framework, Presented at the ECEH'07 - European Conference on eHealth, Oldenburg, Germany, October 2007.
  Download paper (PDF, 348 KB)
• Marco Savini, Henrik Stormer, Andreas Meier: Das eSana Framework: Kontextabhängige Benutzerschnittstellen im mHealth Bereich, Presented at the MoCoMed 2007 Workshop, Augsburg, Germany, September 2007.
  Download paper (PDF, 284 KB)
• Andreea Ionas, Andreas Meier, Ciprian Pop, Marco Savini, Henrik Stormer: Using a Data Warehouse Approach for Mobile Patients, Proceedings of the ECEH'06 - European Conference on eHealth, Fribourg, Switzerland, October 2006.
• Marco Savini, Andreea Ionas, Andreas Meier, Ciprian Pop, Henrik Stormer: The eSana Framework: Mobile Services in eHealth using SOA, Accepted at the Second European Conference on Mobile Goverment, Brighton, UK, August 2006.
  Download paper (PDF, 613 KB) 
• Henrik Stormer, Andreea Ionas und Andreas Meier: Mobile Services for a Medical Communication Center - The eSana Project In: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Mobile Government, July 2005, pp. 387-394.
• Andreea Ionas, Christian Mezger and Henrik Stormer: Das eSana Framework. In: InfoWeek Nr 10, 2005.
• Henrik Stormer, Andreea Ionas and Andreas Meier: Mobile Dienste für ein medizinisches Communication Center: Das eSana Projekt In: eHealthcare Kompendium Schweiz, ISBN 3-9522579-1-6, 2005, pp. 8-11. 

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