Ubiquitous Healthcare: Healthcare Systems and Applications enabled by Mobile and Wireless Technologies

This paper addresses how mobile and wireless technologies can play a role in Ubiquitous Healthcare systems. First, we discuss background information and the differences between traditional computing, location-aware computing and ubiquitous computing. Then, we introduce what is meant by Ubiquitous Healthcare and using a network centric approach we describe the infrastructure and system architecture of the system involved. In the latter part of this paper we present a prototype environment for building systems and applications related to ubiquitous healthcare systems. We make use of mobile phones, off the shelf components and existing technologies in ubiquitous computing (i.e., wireless and mobile positioning technology, data acquisition from sensor and ad hoc networks) and data management (i.e., data capturing, data storage and retrieval, data/signal processing) to build middleware, APIs and tools for the development of systems and applications for ubiquitous healthcare systems. Finally, we discuss the functions and features of mobile phones and use examples to illustrate how mobile and wireless technologies can enable ubiquitous healthcare. Some of these examples are: Location Tracking, Vital Signs and Well-being Data Acquisition and Analysis, Fall Detection and Behaviour Tracking and Sleep Analysis. To conclude the paper we discuss the difficulties we encountered and the major obstacles in research and development on ubiquitous healthcare systems.