Summary
Objective:
Introducing the Special Topic of Methods of Information in Medicine on pervasive healthcare, with selected papers from the Pervasive Healthcare Conference
at Tampere, Finland, January 30 to February 1, 2008.
Methods:
Describing pervasive healthcare as field. Reporting about the content of the selected
papers in this Special Topic. Developing and evaluating physiological measurement
techniques, assistive care ambient notification and reminding systems, ambulatory
monitoring, architectures and platforms for personalized home-health tele-monitoring,
means of privacyprotecting health-sensitive information, and estab - lishing a clinical
proof-of-concept methodology.
Results and Conclusions:
Pervasive healthcare is an emerging field with considerable technological breadth
and expected strong impact for the quality and efficiency of healthcare in an aging
society. However, this field is still a nascent one, with a good deal of exploratory
research. There is also hypothesis-based and empirical research, which tests the assumptions
or feasibility of a solution using clinical evidence, but most such trials at this
time are preliminary and small. The emergence of a truly evidence-based outcomes assessment
will take some time, but is in the making.
Keywords
Pervasive healthcare - pervasive computing - ubiquitous computing