Pervasive Technologies and Support for Independent Living

A broad range of pervasive technologies are used in many domains, including healthcare: however, there appears to be little work examining the role of such technologies in the home, or the different wants and needs of elderly users. Additionally, there exist ethical issues surrounding the use of highly personal healthcare-related data, and interface issues centred on the novelty of the technologies and the disabilities experienced by the users. This report examines these areas, before considering the ways in which they might come together to help support independent-living users with disabilities which may be age-related

A realisation of ethical concerns with smartphone personal health monitoring apps

The pervasiveness of smartphones has facilitated a new way in which owners of devices can monitor their health using applications (apps) that are installed on their smartphones. Smartphone personal health monitoring (SPHM) collects and stores health related data of the user either locally or in a third party storing mechanism. They are also capable of giving feedback to the user of the app in response to conditions are provided to the app therefore empowering the user to actively make decisions to adjust their lifestyle. Regardless of the benefits that this new innovative technology offers to its users, there are some ethical concerns to the user of SPHM apps. These ethical concerns are in some way connected to the features of SPHM apps. From a literature survey, this paper attempts to recognize ethical issues with personal health monitoring apps on smartphones, viewed in light of general ethics of ubiquitous computing. The paper argues that there are ethical concerns with the use of SPHM apps regardless of the benefits that the technology offers to users due to SPHM apps’ ubiquity leaving them open to known and emerging ethical concerns. The paper then propose a need further empirical research to validate the claim

Integrating Volunteered Geographic Information into Pervasive Health Computing Applications

In this paper we describe the potential for using Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in pervasive health computing. We use the OpenStreetMap project as a case-study of a successful VGI project and investigate how it can be expanded and used as a source of spatial information for pervasive computing technologies particularly in the area of access to information on healthcare services

Sensing behaviour in healthcare design

We are entering an era of distributed healthcare that should fit and respond to individual needs, behaviour and lifestyles. Designing such systems is a challenging task that requires continuous information about human behaviour on a large scale, for which pervasive sensing (e.g. using smartphones and wearables) presents exciting opportunities. While mobile sensing approaches are fuelling research in many areas, their use in engineering design remains limited. In this work, we present a collection of common behavioural measures from literature that can be used for a broad range of applications. We focus specifically on activity and location data that can easily be obtained from smartphones or wearables. We further demonstrate how these are applied in healthcare design using an example from dementia care. Comparing a current and proposed scenario exemplifies how integrating sensor-derived information about user behaviour can support the healthcare design goals of personalisation, adaptability and scalability, while emphasising patient quality of life

Healthcare Event and Activity Logging.

The health of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) can change frequently and inexplicably. Crucial events and activities responsible for these changes often go unnoticed. This paper introduces healthcare event and action logging (HEAL) which automatically and unobtrusively monitors and reports on events and activities that occur in a medical ICU room. HEAL uses a multimodal distributed camera network to monitor and identify ICU activities and estimate sanitation-event qualifiers. At the core is a novel approach to infer person roles based on semantic interactions, a critical requirement in many healthcare settings where individuals' identities must not be identified. The proposed approach for activity representation identifies contextual aspects basis and estimates aspect weights for proper action representation and reconstruction. The flexibility of the proposed algorithms enables the identification of people roles by associating them with inferred interactions and detected activities. A fully working prototype system is developed, tested in a mock ICU room and then deployed in two ICU rooms at a community hospital, thus offering unique capabilities for data gathering and analytics. The proposed method achieves a role identification accuracy of 84% and a backtracking role identification of 79% for obscured roles using interaction and appearance features on real ICU data. Detailed experimental results are provided in the context of four event-sanitation qualifiers: clean, transmission, contamination, and unclean

A User-Centred Approach to Reducing Sedentary Behaviour

The use of digital technologies in the administration of healthcare is growing at a rapid rate. However, such platforms are often expensive. As people are living longer, the strain placed on hospitals is increasing. It is evident that a usercentric approach is needed, which aims to prevent illness before a hospital visit is required. As such, with the levels of obesity rising, preventing this illness before such resources are required has the potential to save an enormous amount of time and money, whilst promoting a healthier lifestyle. New and novel approaches are needed, which are inexpensive and pervasive in nature. One such approach is to use human digital memories. This outlet provides visual lifelogs, composed of a variety of data, which can be used to identify periods of inactivity. This paper explores how the DigMem system is used to successfully recognise activity and create temporal memory boxes of human experiences, which can be used to monitor sedentary behaviour

Service oriented centered e-health solution for monitoring and preventing chronic diseases

The modern and continuously changing lifestyles in almost all parts of the world resulted in an increase in the incidence of chronic diseases (CDs). To reduce risks associated with chronic diseases, health professionals are studying various clinical solutions. As a result of recent advances in sensing technology, wireless communications, and distributed communication, the monitoring of patients\u27 health condition and the elaboration of prevention plans are considered the most promising solutions for the treatment of chronic diseases. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for monitoring chronic diseases and tracking their vital signs. The framework relies on the service orientation concepts and standards to integrate various subsystems. Monitoring of subjects\u27 health condition, using various sensors and wireless devices, aims to proactively detect any risk of chronic diseases. The system will allow generating and customizing preventive plans dynamically according to the subject\u27s health profile and context while considering many impelling parameters. As a proof of concept of our monitoring and tracking schemes, we have considered a case study for which we have collected and analyzed preliminary data