Biography

A Professor of computing and systems engineering. Prior to joining Kingston University London in January 2012, he was a professor and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Technology at the University of Jordan. His research interests include eHealth and mHealth applications, distributed systems, wireless networks and security, scheduling and real-time computing, and systems modelling and stability analyses. He has authored or co-authored over 75 technical papers, a book on microprocessors and a book chapter on symbolic-numeric computation. He awarded over 10 scientific prizes and 8 research funding awards from national, regional and international organisations. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of EU Marie Curie Association. He has served as Chair/Vice Chair of the IEEE Computer/Computational Intelligence Joint Societies – Jordan Section, and participated in organising several International Conferences.

Keynote Speech Title: eHealth: New trends and challenges in diabetes self-management support

Abstract

E-Health comprises a wide-range of activities undertaken in the health sector using information that is collected, transmitted, monitored or stored and obtained electronically to support the delivery of health services both at a local level and to provide health care over a distance. To address the challenges currently faced by the health sector, of which the economic challenging is one of the most outstanding, a range of innovative eHealth initiatives are being developed around the world. These initiatives set upon projects and offer solutions from a range of angles to mitigate challenges that are threatening sustainability of the health sector. A great demand has been placed on the health care service delivery due to demographic changes as well as scientific and technological advances that hold relevance to the information and telecommunication systems.  These developments include mobile health (mHealth), wireless technologies, cloud computing, and more recently robotic coaching and robot-assisted therapy. In this talk, a new eHealth platform which incorporates humanoid robots to support self-management of type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) which mainly develops in children and adolescents will be presented. Architecture of the platform encompasses a physical-objects layer linked to a remote Web-based health portal. The physical layer incorporates wireless nodes; each of which comprises a set of medical sensors connected wirelessly to a humanoid robot. The health portal which hosts main system applications and storage plays key roles in remote collection and processing of patients’ data and generating real-time feedback to patients, depending on their individual needs. It also provides educational modules around diabetes and facilitates patient-carer interactivity over a distance without restrictions of time or geographical position. Acceptability of the developed platform by its main users (patients and health care professionals) is also investigated through a pilot clinical trial conducted with the aid of NHS collaborators at the UK.Some videos which demonstrate examples of real health care service delivery scenarios relevant to T1DM self-management will also be presented.