Real-time interactive medical consultation using a pervasive healthcare architecture

Abstract

The phenomenon of an aging society has derived problems such as shortage of medical resources, rising healthcare costs and reduction of quality in healthcare services. Pervasive healthcare aims to alleviate these problems, but many issues remain to be resolved. This paper presents a system called CARA (Context Aware Real-time Assistant) whose design goals are to address these issues in a pervasive long-term healthcare solution. CARA aims to provide efficient healthcare services by adapting the healthcare technology to fit in with normal activities of the elderly and working practices of the caregivers. This system can continuously measure physiological signals, and either store the data on the server or stream the data to a remote location in real-time. A design goal of ubiquitous access has prompted the design of the system as a rich internet application. The only tool required is a web browser with the commonly-available Adobe Flash plug-in installed. Thus the system enables access and analysis on any internet-connected PC or appropriate smart device, independent of geographic location. The remote monitoring and data review applications of CARA are presented at as the main implementation examples. The results of experiments using the system are presented. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.