Designing Pervasive Healthcare Applications in the Home

Designing Pervasive Healthcare Applications in the Home

Toshiyo Tamura (Chiba University, Japan), Isao Mizukura (Chiba University, Japan), Yutaka Kimura (Kansai Medical Univeristy, Japan) and Haruyuki Tatsumi (Sapporo Medical University, Japan)
Copyright: © 2010 |Pages: 13
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-765-7.ch013

Abstract

The authors propose a new home health care system for the acquisition and transmission of data from ordinary home health care appliances, such as blood pressure monitors and weight balances. In this chapter, they briefly explain a standard protocol for data collection and a simple interface to accommodate different monitoring systems that make use of different data protocols. The system provides for one-way data transmission, thus saving power and extending to CCITT. Their standardized protocol was verified during a 1-year field test involving 20 households in Japan. Data transmission errors between home health care devices and the home gateway were 4.21/day with their newly developed standard protocol. Over a 1-year period, they collected and analyzed data from 241,000 separate sources associated with both healthy, home-based patients and chronically ill, clinic-based patients, the latter with physician intervention. They evaluated some possible applications for collecting daily health care data and introduce some of their findings, relating primarily to body weight and blood pressure monitoring for elderly subjects in their own homes.
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Background

A system for automatic health monitoring in the home has been considered for health management and disease prevention. The onset of lifestyle diseases, such as hypertension, arteriosclerosis, and diabetes, is highly correlated with daily activities, such as physical exercise, sleep, and nutrition. Daily monitoring is important in preventing such diseases and in achieving a healthier quality of life. Although the monitoring of daily activities is not well established in evidence-based health care, many attempts have been made at installing sensors and transducers to monitor daily home life.

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