**Smart Health Management Technology**

Hiroshi Nakajima *Omron Corporation Japan* 

#### **1. Introduction**

58 Health Management – Different Approaches and Solutions

"TEXTILE WIRE version 03.01-e", (2005). ELEKTRO-FEINDRHAT-AG, Switzerland. Zephyr-Technology (2010). Case Study: Zephyr Provides Physiological Monitoring of

http://www.zephyr-technology.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Case-

Chilean Miners During San Jose Mine Rescue Operation.

Study-Chilean-Miner-Rescue-Operation.pdf

The notion of health management technology (HMT) is simple but powerful because it employs the ideas of cyclical evolution and synergetic integration of devices and services based on causality and human machine collaboration (Nakajima, 2008a). It can be applied for the different entities of human beings, artifacts, and nature environment as following discussions.

An essential and simple observation and understanding of our world reveals that it can be considered as comprising humans, artifacts, and nature environments shown in Fig.1. Even though the values of the entities are given by humans, they have obviously different directions. Examples of such values are comfort and safety for humans, efficiency and effectiveness for artifacts, and environmental enhancement for nature. The problem is that these values come into conflict with each other. Examples of conflicts in a factory are as follows. Productivity related to efficiency and effectiveness is the most important value in manufacturing lines. However, the focus only on productivity will increase the emission of carbon dioxide and other contaminants that will negatively influence to the sustainability of nature environment, and the safety and comfort of human operators in the manufacturing line. Thus, the conflicts of values among the respective entities cause serious problems in important areas such as the environment, agriculture and food, security and safety, and human health these days. In this sense, harmonization among them should be realized with keeping good health condition of each entity for realizing a desired next society. Although this vision might look grandiloquent, health management of each entity is considered as important activity as steady steps toward the bright future.

Because of recent development of information and communication technology (ICT), sensory networks have been pervading various fields such as home security, healthcare, condition-based maintenance for manufacturing equipment, and environment monitoring. They require the suitable integration of both sensing devices and valuable services.

HMT is designed for providing basic four kinds of functions by centering causality. The functions are measurement, recognition, estimation, and evolution. The functions provide the solution of cyclical evolvement based on causality which abstractly illustrates conditions of target systems and is used as problem solving knowledge, which is composed of feature attributes extracted from sensory data and intermediate characteristics. In this sense, causality could evolve and be updated according to sophistication of sensing and control mechanisms. Because the nature of causality is transparent to humans, the structure can be easily improved through human-machine collaboration. This feature of the technology is quite important because the integration of human knowledge and sensory data will bring a

Smart Health Management Technology 61

Fig.3 shows an overview of HMT based on causality. The objective of the technology is to estimate the health condition of humans, artifacts, and nature to improve their health. Because the target system continuously changes and their health management systems must adapt to these changes, the cause-effect structure must evolve cyclically and continuously according to sophistication of both the target system and its management side. In HMT, four

*Recognition***:**

Measurement value

*Estimation*:

 *Measurement* is to quantify of phenomena to arrive at a value from analyzing signals from sensors. The function is realized by the elemental technologies of feature

 *Recognition* is to identify the condition of the target system using the measured value. The function is based on the pattern recognition technologies such as discrimination,

 *Estimation* is to project the past and future status of the system. The functions of diagnosis and prognosis are realized by employing cause-effect structure. The elements of technology for realizing this function are probability graphs and causal models such

 *Evolution* is to improve the target system and to update causality by the discovery of new events and make changes in the target system. The function should be realized by

It is important for us to manage our health by considering diet meal, sleep and rest, and exercise. There is important causality among these lifestyle habits and vital signals such as blood pressure, blood glucose, and blood adipose. Even though it has not been realized yet,

The example of human health management is introduced for explaining effectiveness and efficiency of multivariate time series data and their cause-effect structure. The sensory data are used for composing the causality that can be applied to prevent diseases and to improve health. Among biological information, blood pressure is usually used as an important index

**Identification of condition**

**Projection of past and future**

**"Cause" "Effect"**

**Prognosis**

**Diagnosis**

Anomaly

Normal

functions are defined for cyclically evolving the model as shown in Fig.3.

Measurement values

**Objects**

**Sensing**

**Improvement of health**

• **Provide knowledge for decision** 

• **Discover the new measurement value**⇒ **new component** • **Acquisition of new cause-effect structure** ⇒**new solution**

Fig. 3. Four functions of health management technology

extraction, feature selection, and feature evaluation.

as Bayesian network, structure equation model, etc.

human-machine collaborative systems analysis and design.

*Evolution*:

**support**

classification, and identification.

the ideal example is shown in Fig.4.

*Measurement***:**

**Quantification of phenomena**

**2.1 Overviews** 

powerful and sophisticated solution for complex problems. HMT has been applied to various types of applications such as human healthcare, machine health monitoring in manufacturing process, and energy management systems. Some case studies of human health care are introduced in the article.

Fig. 1. The world consists of humans, artifacts, and nature environment

The rest of this chapter is organized as follows; Section 2 proposes Health Management Technology; Section 3 and 4 introduce the applications of visceral fat estimation and heart rate estimation respectively; Section 5 concludes this chapter.
