Requirements and design spaces of mobile medical care

Abstract

Pervasive care and chronic disease management to reduce institutionalization is a priority for most western countries. The realization of next generation ubiquitous and pervasive healthcare systems will be a challenging task, as these systems are likely to involve a complex structure. Such systems will consist of various devices, ranging from resource-constrained sensors and actuators to complex multimedia devices, supporting time critical applications. This is further compounded by cultural and socio-economical factors that must be addressed for next generation healthcare systems to be widely diffused and used. These factors have a direct impact on the system and security models and will require further understanding to encourage users to embrace and adopt the new technology. These models must capture not only the perceived value of the new technology and its ease of use, but most importantly the perceived risk of using this technology. This paper outlines the design space of pervasive health monitoring with body sensor networks and derives the requirements for connected pervasive medical care systems. Commercial and academic mobile medical sensor systems have been mapped to the requirements derived and a comparative analysis of state of the technology is given.