title: Architecture of a wireless Personal Assistant for telemedical diabetes care.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Advanced information technologies joined to the increasing use of continuous medical devices for monitoring and treatment, have made possible the definition of a new telemedical diabetes care scenario based on a hand-held Personal Assistant (PA). This paper describes the architecture, functionality and implementation of the PA, which communicates different medical devices in a personal wireless network.
  
  
  METHODS
  The PA is a mobile system for patients with diabetes connected to a telemedical center. The software design follows a modular approach to make the integration of medical devices or new functionalities independent from the rest of its components. Physicians can remotely control medical devices from the telemedicine server through the integration of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and mobile GPRS communications. Data about PA modules' usage and patients' behavior evaluation come from a pervasive tracing system implemented into the PA.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The PA architecture has been technically validated with commercially available medical devices during a clinical experiment for ambulatory monitoring and expert feedback through telemedicine. The clinical experiment has allowed defining patients' patterns of usage and preferred scenarios and it has proved the Personal Assistant's feasibility. The patients showed high acceptability and interest in the system as recorded in the usability and utility questionnaires. Future work will be devoted to the validation of the system with automatic control strategies from the telemedical center as well as with closed-loop control algorithms.
authors.affiliation: Bioengineering and Telemedicine Center, ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad, Politécnica de Madrid, 28040-Madrid, Spain. ggarcia@gbt.tfo.upm.es
authors.forename: Gema
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: García-Sáez
authors.forename: M Elena
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Hernando
authors.forename: Iñaki
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Martínez-Sarriegui
authors.forename: Mercedes
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rigla
authors.forename: Verónica
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Torralba
authors.forename: Eulalia
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Brugués
authors.forename: Alberto
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: de Leiva
authors.forename: Enrique J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Gómez
mesh_terms: D001786:Blood Glucose / Q000378:metabolism; D034201:Computers, Handheld; D003920:Diabetes Mellitus / Q000097:blood / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D001786:Blood Glucose