PERVASIVE HEALTHCARE: APPLICATIONS, CHALLENGES AND WIRELESS SOLUTIONS

A major challenge for healthcare is how to provide improved services to an increasing number of people using limited financial and human resources. Pervasive healthcare is considered a solution to many existing problems and a possible future of the current healthcare services. In simple terms, pervasive healthcare can be defined as healthcare to anyone, anytime, and anywhere by removing locational, time and other restraints while increasing both its coverage and quality. The broad definition includes prevention, healthcare maintenance and checkups, short-term monitoring (or home healthcare monitoring), long-term monitoring (nursing home), personalized healthcare monitoring, incidence detection and management, and, emergency intervention, transportation and treatment. These requirements could be effectively supported by universal, efficient and reliable access to healthcare services, providers, and biomedical information that is available at any time. In this paper, several pervasive healthcare applications and related challenges are discussed. An integrated wireless architecture that is designed to use the capabilities of current and emerging wireless and mobile networks for location management, intelligent emergency system, patient monitoring, and mobile telemedicine applications is presented.