Privacy and Data Protection in Elderly Healthcare: Threats and Legal Warranties

The progressive aging of the population requires new kinds of social and medical intervention and the availability of different services provided to the elder population. New applications have been developed and some services are now provided at home, allowing the older people to stay home instead of having to stay in hospitals. But an adequate response to the needs of the users will imply a high percentage of use of personal data and information, including the building up and maintenance of user profiles, feeding the systems with the data and information needed for a proactive intervention in scheduling of events in which the user may be involved. Fundamental Rights may be at stake, so a legal analysis must also be considered.

The need for standardized tests to evaluate the reliability of data transport in wireless medical systems

Wireless medical systems are comprised of four stages, namely the medical device, the data transport, the data collection and the data evaluation stages. Whereas the performance of the first stage is highly regulated, the others are not. This paper concentrates on the data transport stage and argues that it is necessary to establish standardized tests to be used by medical device manufacturers to provide comparable results concerning the communication performance of the wireless networks used to transport medical data. Besides, it suggests test parameters and procedures to be used to produce comparable communication performance results.

Voxel-based registration of simulated and real patient CBCT data for accurate dental implant pose estimation

The success of dental implant-supported prosthesis is directly linked to the accuracy obtained during implant’s pose estimation (position and orientation). Although traditional impression techniques and recent digital acquisition methods are acceptably accurate, a simultaneously fast, accurate and operator-independent methodology is still lacking. Hereto, an image-based framework is proposed to estimate the patient-specific implant’s pose using cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) and prior knowledge of implanted model. The pose estimation is accomplished in a threestep approach: (1) a region-of-interest is extracted from the CBCT data using 2 operator-defined points at the implant’s main axis; (2) a simulated CBCT volume of the known implanted model is generated through Feldkamp-Davis-Kress reconstruction and coarsely aligned to the defined axis; and (3) a voxel-based rigid registration is performed to optimally align both patient and simulated CBCT data, extracting the implant’s pose from the optimal transformation. Three experiments were performed to evaluate the framework: (1) an in silico study using 48 implants distributed through 12 tridimensional synthetic mandibular models; (2) an in vitro study using an artificial mandible with 2 dental implants acquired with an i-CAT system; and (3) two clinical case studies. The results shown positional errors of 67±34μm and 108μm, and angular misfits of 0.15±0.08º and 1.4º, for experiment 1 and 2, respectively. Moreover, in experiment 3, visual assessment of clinical data results shown a coherent alignment of the reference implant. Overall, a novel image-based framework for implants’ pose estimation from CBCT data was proposed, showing accurate results in agreement with dental prosthesis modelling requirements.