A Comprehensive View of the Technologies Involved in Pervasive Care

Abstract

It is widely accepted that the application of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) in the healthcare environment leads to an improvement in medicine and healthcare delivery. The ageing of population, the prevalence of chronic condition, and other societal changes, as well as advancements in science and technology, require an evolution in healthcare delivery from centralized, general and reactive care, towards distributed, personalized and preventive care. The application of ICT can address these new scenarios but it is needed a methodological approach to establish common guidelines so that the developed systems are interoperable, reusable and future-proof. In this chapter, we present a methodology based on Open Distributed Processing (ODP) and standards to address the complexity of design and development of distributed systems in healthcare. This methodology specifies systems according to decomposition in viewpoints, each one focused on particular issues. We test this method by applying it to the general healthcare domain and particularizing it for a specific use case of an ICT application, a pervasive care system. We describe both the technology neutral viewpoints and those dependent on it.