Web-based acquisition, storage, and retrieval of biomedical signals.

When Francis Bacon stated in the 16th century that “knowledge itself is power” he could have had no concept of the dilemma facing professionals in the 21st century. The root of this dilemma is the exponential increase in both data and information, in the absence of any widely adopted international standards for data representation. Accessibility to information is also an issue. As far back as 1962, Marshall McLuhan proposed that society would need to adapt its practices to the world’s communications infrastructure: “the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village” [1]. Societal implications aside, our particular interest in biomedical signals databases is driven by these considerations and the need to manage data from a variety of disparate recording sites. Web technology can greatly facilitate the acquisition and retrieval of these signals. In order to combine these signals from many disparate and proprietary data acquisition devices into a meaningful knowledge base, data storage standards must be developed and adopted. Although an official standard for the storage of biomedical signals exists (ASTM 1467), it has not been widely adopted [2]. Other standards based on the representation of vital signs information (ENV 13734) and the medical information bus (IEEE 1073) have also been promulgated. However, the complexities of adherence and the lack of commercial motivation for adoption of these standards have meant that most clinical measurement devices use their own proprietary formats to internally represent data. The web allows ubiquitous access to distributed databases through standard browser technology. However, appropriate middleware software needs to be developed to provide the tools both for accessing databases over the web and ensuring that querying the knowledge base is possible [3]. In this article we explore a number of these web technologies and examine a case study based around the acquisition of respiratory flow signals from a web-enabled spirometer.