Daniel J. Valentino - US grants

A planning grant is requested to establish a multi-disciplinary effort at UCLA to apply wireless, mobile networking to support seamless transition of applications across heterogeneous clients for patient record retrieval in medical settings. The planning grant will be used to establish a very small testbed with heterogeneous devices that include desktop computers, laptops, and hand held devices, to provide an environment in which to deploy an early prototype of the proposed system. The testbed will also allow us to enhance interactions among the researchers from different disciplines and the campus telecommunications facility to prepare for an eventual full throttled deployment of the system. Lastly, the small physical testbed will allow us to cleanly separate the advanced development concerns from the more research-oriented issues such that we can deploy the system using state of the art COTS tools while simultaneously pursuing research ideas to influence the next generation of the proposed environment.

The researchers envision that within the next few years mobile and wireless access to the Internet will very likely become the norm, rather than the exception as is seen today. This proposal describes the plans to develop and deploy iMASH, a network system that supports anytime, anywhere, on any platform access to the electronic patient records database for healthcare providers. The objective is to provide the capability for real-time, multimedia communication, so that a physician may access, on the move, the patients record and other relevant information as filtered by the physician's user profile, and may migrate ongoing application sessions seamlessly to different platforms that range from a high performance diagnostic workstation in the physician's office to hand held PDAs in the examination room. While the proposed techniques are general and extend to a range of mobile applications, the specific target of this project is healthcare applications. To this end, the researchers will develop a clinical testbed, which will serve as a laboratory for developing, testing, and evaluating advanced information technology in the context of patient care. The testbed will provide the user requirements to drive the iMASH architecture design, and will permit direct, realistic validation of the research results.
The researchers expect to make the following contributions from this research and development effort:
1) Development of a middleware infrastructure that provides support for anytime, anywhere, on any platform access to the Internet
2) A suite of wireless networking protocols and algorithms that provide quality of service support in a mobile, heterogeneous networking environment
3) A deployment of iMASH within the UCLA Medial School and a controlled study to evaluate its effectiveness in reducing healthcare costs and improving physician effectiveness
4) A system emulation capability that can be used to evaluate the performance and scalability of the middleware services and protocols across multiple dimensions including number of users, number of devices, types of applications, and geographical area. The emulator will be used to 'test drive' novel protocols and applications prior to deployment on the physical testbed.
The researchers have assembled a strong research and development team to undertake the iMASH effort. The team possesses the necessary expertise in the related areas of networking (Zhang, Gerla), wireless communications (Gerla, Lu), parallel and distributed systems (Bagrodia, Gerla), performance evaluation (Bagrodia), computerized medicine (Valentino, McCoy), clinical evaluation of technological innovations in improving heath care (Fiske), and campus computing and communication technology (Solomon).
A longer term goal of this effort is to deploy iMASH-like technology widely within the UCLA campus to support ubiquitous multimedia access for students and faculty, and to support wireless distance education. To enable appropriate technology transition, the team also includes two key members from the university administration: the CIO for the medical school (McCoy) and the Associate Vice-chancellor of Administrative Services with line responsibility over campus telecommunications (Solomon). The UCLA Hospital has recently embarked on a historical reconstruction with a $1 billion endowment. An integral part of the reconstruction is availability of complete wireless connectivity within the hospital. The UCLA campus is also engaged in a project to upgrade the network connectivity throughout the campus with the aim of providing a minimum of 10Mbps bandwidth from desktop to desktop within any two locations on campus. Planning is underway to further enhance this capability with wireless connectivity. These two technology initiatives provide a unique opportunity to insert the iMASH technology in widespread use within the UCLA campus, and subsequently to other locations.