Advances in technology and the increased use of home medical devices, such as blood glucose meters, blood pressure monitors and heart monitors are revolutionising the way public healthcare is administered. Homes and their associated networks in conjunction with such devices will take over many mundane healthcare tasks and manage new and enriched lifestyle choices that are at present dramatically affecting our overall quality of life. The combination of wireless and fixed networking infrastructures will form explicit links between the home and its devices and external entities such as gymnasiums, hospitals and general practitioner surgeries. Through these interconnected networks new real-time healthcare management systems will emerge that continually provide information and react to adverse or unusual medical conditions received from occupants within the home. Each home user will be empowered to influence all aspects of their health where healthcare practitioners are continually informed and only used for more specialised treatments. We can see obvious benefits such a system would bring. For example, we can make decisions about actions under consideration and influence this may have on long-term health. Whether this is through real-time monitoring or trend analysis, a better understanding of health and lifestyle choices will gain which at present is not possible. Movement towards this vision is already evident. For example, pacemaker technology is well understood and a natural progression would be to make such devices wireless, allowing easy connectivity to home, hospital and healthcare practitioner networks. This will undoubtedly lead to the development of a multitude of other similar devices designed to carry out some medical function to proactively monitor and act upon adverse factors that may threaten the health of a person. Healthcare practitioners will have direct access to these devices where they could be controlled or queried allowing data to be stored, accessed, and used in assessments. Given this use of networked devices home users could even pose questions about their health will gain to millions of networked sensors either insider or outside the body, with each sensor providing information about a particular aspect of a person's health. Much work has been
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:590091 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Haroon, Arshad |
| Publisher | Liverpool John Moores University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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