Women at Risk: The Health of Women in New York City

Examines the extent to which women in New York City experience significant and pervasive health problems. Identifies subgroups that are at particular risk, focusing on race/ethnicity, income, age, and healthcare coverage. Examines policy objectives

Decentralised Clinical Guidelines Modelling with Lightweight Coordination Calculus

Background: Clinical protocols and guidelines have been considered as a major means to ensure that cost-effective services are provided at the point of care. Recently, the computerisation of clinical guidelines has attracted extensive research interest. Many languages and frameworks have been developed. Thus far, however,an enactment mechanism to facilitate decentralised guideline execution has been a largely neglected line of research. It is our contention that decentralisation is essential to maintain a high-performance system in pervasive health care scenarios. In this paper, we propose the use of Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) as a feasible solution. LCC is a light-weight and executable process calculus that has been used successfully in multi-agent systems, peer-to-peer (p2p) computer networks, etc. In light of an envisaged pervasive health care scenario, LCC, which represents clinical protocols and guidelines as message-based interaction models, allows information exchange among software agents distributed across different departments and/or hospitals. Results: We outlined the syntax and semantics of LCC; proposed a list of refined criteria against which the appropriateness of candidate clinical guideline modelling languages are evaluated; and presented two LCC interaction models of real life clinical guidelines. Conclusions: We demonstrated that LCC is particularly useful in modelling clinical guidelines. It specifies the exact partition of a workflow of events or tasks that should be observed by multiple "players" as well as the interactions among these "players". LCC presents the strength of both process calculi and Horn clauses pair of which can provide a close resemblance of logic programming and the flexibility of practical implementation

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

Research Opportunities and Visions for Smart and Pervasive Health

Improving the health of the nation's population and increasing the capabilities of the US healthcare system to support diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease is a critical national and societal priority. In the past decade, tremendous advances in expanding computing capabilities--sensors, data analytics, networks, advanced imaging, and cyber-physical systems--have, and will continue to, enhance healthcare and health research, with resulting improvements in health and wellness. However, the cost and complexity of healthcare continues to rise alongside the impact of poor health on productivity and quality of life. What is lacking are transformative capabilities that address significant health and healthcare trends: the growing demands and costs of chronic disease, the greater responsibility placed on patients and informal caregivers, and the increasing complexity of health challenges in the US, including mental health, that are deeply rooted in a person's social and environmental context.Comment: A Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper, 12 page

An initiative for the creation of open datasets within pervasive healthcare

In this paper issues surrounding the collection, annotation, management and sharing of data gathered from pervasive health systems are presented. The overarching motivation for this work has been to provide an approach whereby annotated data sets can be made readily accessible to the research community in an effort to assist the advancement of the state-of-the-art in activity recognition and behavioural analysis using pervasive health systems. Recommendations of how this can be made a reality are presented in addition to the initial steps which have been taken to facilitate such an initiative involving the definition of common formats for data storage and a common set of tools for data processing and visualization

Functional privacy concerns of older adults about pervasive health-monitoring systems

Technologies designed to support ageing can be deemed to be ageist in that they often exhibit a benevolent paternalism that tries to ‘protect’ older people. Often this involves gathering extensive data to monitor physical and cognitive decline at the expense of an individual’s privacy, with an underlying, often implicit, assumption that older adults no longer need much privacy. We consider such issues in the context of a project which seeks to promote the well-being of older adults. We conducted interviews with 20 older adults (10 males, 10 females, mean age=73) to ask, under what health and wellbeing circumstances would they wish to protect their privacy? Using thematic analysis, we uncovered six distinct reasons why older adults want to maintain privacy: protection from harm, autonomy, to present a positive social identity, to break free from social norms, to protect others, and to protect their own self-concept. We conclude that privacy is a highly valued resource for older adults and one that enables them to live fulfilling lives. We consider the design implications of our findings, noting that designers should aim to protect privacy from the outset, rather than viewing privacy as a ‘bolt-on’ that would inhibit data collection under specific circumstances. These concerns speak to the ‘paternalism’ agenda, in that older adults should be considered as active agents in the management of their own data disclosures