Ubiquitous Computing for Health and Medicine
Chris Atkinson, Bonnie Kaplan, Kent Larson, Henrique Martins, Jay Lundell, Martin Harris · 2006
The University of Manchester, will report on current and future research and development that explores the use of ubiquitous and mobile devices in the diagnosis and monitoring of patients within their domicilary setting by primary care providers.The research and development is based on creating clusters of general practices within the UK's National Health Service.These clusters would pool their diagnostic technologies and specialist medical skills together.They would share ubiquitous patient monitoring technologies and access patient notes, teleconsultations, and clinical images through the NHSnet and telecommunications media.These, in turn, would be augmented with therapeutic care to chronically ill individuals using domiciliary ubiquitous devices and patient monitoring technologies.Kent Larson, Director, Changing Places, Principle Research Scientist, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will discuss PlaceLab, a highly instrumented apartment-scale shared research facility where new technologies and design concepts can be tested and evaluated in the context of everyday living.The rich sensing infrastructure of the PlaceLab will be used to develop techniques to recognize patterns of sleep, eating, socializing, recreation, etc. Particularly for the elderly, changes in baseline activities of daily hving are believed to be important early indicators of emerging health problems, often preceding indications frombiometric monitoring.The unique data sets generated by the PlaceLab will aid in the development of activity pattern recognition tools.Techniques will be tested that support the effective human-computer interaction required for the proactive encouragement of healthy behaviors related to diet, exercise, medication adherence, etc.Henrique M. G. Martins, Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge, will discuss hospital organizations, where ubiquitous computing is increasingly manifesting itself via initiatives to implement and deploy mobile information communication technology (MICT) devices like PDAs, tablet PCs, and mounted PCs on carts, with and without wireless support.The assumption is that such devices can enhance clinical work practices.Such, however, deserves to be analyzed, as well as the attitudes and practices of hospital organizations toward the usage of such devices by clinicians.Based on fieldwork data from the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal and Singapore, effects of mobile ICTs on clinical practice by individual doctors will be discussed.At the organizational level, a preliminary categorization of different strategies will be advanced together with illustrative examples from researched cases.Jay Lundell, Senior Researcher, Proactive Health Group, Intel, will discuss Intel's Proactive Health Group, which explores the ways in which ubiquitous computing can support the daily health and wellness needs of people in their homes and everyday lives.