Pervasive Healthcare Computing: EMR/EHR, Wireless and Health Monitoring

Abstract

The application of pervasive computing and smart technol-ogy to our social life is changing it in both great depth and scope, and it will improve the healthcare system as well. Black et al. [1] envisioned that as pervasive computing devel-ops, there will be an evolution from isolated " smart spaces " to more integrated enterprise environments where the dream of unconstrained, ubiquitous, pervasive computing will face the realities of enterprise requirements, market forces, stan-dardization, government regulation, security, and privacy. These tensions are particularly strong in the case of health-care, given the promise of smart spaces to improve care and lower costs, the many parties with legitimate interests, and the medical and legal risks. The author defined pervasive healthcare, based on per-vasive computing, as the conceptual system of providing healthcare to anyone, at anytime, and anywhere by removing the restraints of time and location while increasing both the coverage and the quality of healthcare. Pervasive healthcare computing --or u-Healthcare --is at the forefront of deliver-ing healthcare services to patients at other sites, and presents the ways in which mobile and wireless technologies can be used to implement the vision of pervasive healthcare. Large general and special hospitals are soon to be among the first to adopt smart and pervasive computing in service and man-agement. The book introduces healthcare IT challenges and require-ments (patient-oriented, system-oriented, and healthcare professionals-oriented), presents a state-of-the-art overview of all available and emerging wireless and mobile technolo-gies, and covers emerging challenges of IT in healthcare such as context-awareness, reliability, adaptiveness, scalability of wireless health monitoring systems, suitability, and personal-ization. This vision includes prevention, health maintenance, and checkups; short-term monitoring (home healthcare