Capturing and Analyzing Pervasive Data for SmartHealth

In this paper, we study how mobile computing and wireless technologies can be explored to provide effective ubiquitous healthcare services. Instead of reinventing the wheels, we make use of smartphones, off-the-shelf components, and existing technologies in ubiquitous computing (i.e. wireless and mobile positioning technologies, and data acquisition techniques and processing via sensors) to develop a middleware, and tools for the development of systems and applications to provide effective ubiquitous healthcare services. Two main tasks to be studied are: 1) Developing a framework, called SmartHealth, to provide the infrastructure and architectural support for realizing ubiquitous healthcare services, and 2) Designing and developing ubiquitous healthcare applications by utilizing the SmartHealth framework to let users experience and benefit from the provided services. We use scenarios to illustrate how mobile/wireless and sensor technologies can enable ubiquitous healthcare services in Smart Health. Some of the examples included in Smart Health are: location tracking, vital signs and well-being data acquisition and analysis, fall detection and behavior monitoring, and sleep analysis. As a start, based on the Smart Health framework, we introduce a smartphone app, called Smart Mood, for tracking the mood of patients who are suffering mood disorder (i.e., manic and depression) to demonstrate how Smart Health can effectively enable ubiquitous healthcare services.

I. Introduction

We are entering a new era of computing - the era of ubiquitous/pervasive computing where we can retrieve any data from any devices through any types of networks at any time anyplace. These new technologies will bring us a step closer to a more secure, convenient, and better quality of living towards a Ubiquitous Intelligent Community. For example, to materialize the benefits of ubiquitous computing, under the Government's Digital 21 Strategy, it is proposed to upgrade Hong Kong to be a smarter city to realize the slogan “Smarter Hong Kong, Smarter Living”. To provide the infrastructure for ubiquitous computing, the government is enhancing the existing wireless network infrastructure for connecting various ubiquitous computing devices and applications. However, other than the communication infrastructure, it is still lack of any efficient system framework for the development of ubiquitous computing applications.