Abstract-The field of interest discussed in this study is a novel codification scheme for (vital signs) medical device communication and patient monitoring data interchange, into the context of effective home care service provisioning. With medical technology having developed in isolation and major manufacturers developing their own proprietary communication protocols, which preclude connection to devices from different manufacturers, and with healthcare trends having evolved, pointing to primary care, telecare and home care monitoring, there is an increasing need for technical standardization in healthcare environments and the development of protocols that enable communication in a structured and open way. In this study, a novel codification scheme has been developed, based on two healthcare informatics standards, the VITAL and DICOM Sup. 30, in addressing the robust interchange of waveform and medical data for a home care application. Based on this scheme, we created a real-time facility, consisting of a base unit and a telemedicine (mobile) unit, that enables home telemonitoring, by installing the telemedicine unit at the patient's home while the base unit remains at the physician's office or hospital. The system allows the transmission of vital biosignals (3-lead ECG, pulse rate, blood pressure and SpO 2 ) of the patient. This paper presents an object-oriented design with unified modeling language (UML) of a class hierarchy for exchanging the acquired medical data and performing alert management, and investigates the applicability of the proposed scheme into a commercial patient-connected medical device, thus addressing service and functionality requirements with focus on home-care applications. The system has been validated for technical performance over several telecommunication means and for clinical validity via real patient-involved pilot trials.

I. INTRODUCTIONR ECENT technological advances in medicine have facilitated the development of complex biomedical systems including sophisticated biomedical signal devices and instruments, medical imaging equipment, and computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) tools enabling the better delivery of healthcare services. In parallel, computational intelligence, incorporating neural computing, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computing, and more recently, rough sets, and autoimmune systems have emerged as promising tools for the development, application, and implementation of intelligent systems.In the last ten years, there has been a significant effort in the application of computational intelligent techniques in numerous biomedical systems. These cover applications in medical decision-making [1], biosignal analysis, and biomedical engineering at large [2], medical imaging [3]-[5], bioinformatics [6], [7], and others. All these systems underlie the impact of these technologies in the biomedical domain.The aim of this special issue is to focus on the most recent applications of computational intelligent systems in medicine. Papers in this special issue cover innovative applications of computational intelligence in the following physiological systems: skin, skeletal, muscular, central nervous, peripheral nervous, systems of special senses (eye), cardiovascular, respiratory, and reproductive.A total of 45 papers were submitted for this special issue that were reviewed by at least three reviewers. Following the recommendations of the guest editors and the Editor-in-Chief, 19 papers were accepted for publication. The accepted papers were organized under the topics: General, Computational Biology, Biosignal Analysis, and Medical Imaging, with two, three, seven, and seven papers in each topic, respectively. Some of these papers (10 in total) have been published earlier by mistake, unfortunately in previous issues of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN BIOMEDICINE. All the accepted papers are briefly summarized in the following section.It is generally accepted that, nowadays, health services are facing a number of complex interacting and multifactorial challenges [8]. To address these issues from the information and communication technologies (ICTs) perspective, the World Health Assembly (WHA) adopted an eHealth Strategy for the World Health Organization (WHO) [9]. The resolution documented that the use of ICT for health is one of the most rapidly growing application areas in health today. Moreover, it was proposed that automated or semiautomated systems that support

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