Database Reference
In-Depth Information
the United States has risen from $239.5 billion in 2000 to $524 billion in
2010, and this is likely to continue significant growth for the foreseeable
future.
Aging in place
has been proposed as one method to reduce cost
and maintain quality of life for the aging population. The concept is to
support older adults in the environment of their choice as opposed to
placing them in traditional clinical settings or or nursing home environ-
ments. Healthcare is being looked at as a continuum expanding outside
of traditional clinical settings with goals to make it more proactive to
reduce stress on medical institutions. Providing healthcare support out-
side of clinical environments with smart monitoring devices and e-health
technology has been the focus of much research recently, specially in the
ubiquitous computing research community.
Ubiquitous healthcare [71] is an emerging field of research that uses a
large number of environmental and body sensors and actuators combined
with sensor mining and analytic technologies to monitor and improve
health of people in these types of settings. Ubiquitous healthcare ap-
proaches often employ several distributed and wireless sensors to gather
information on bodily conditions such as temperature, heart rate, blood
pressure, blood and urine chemical levels, breathing rate and volume,
activity levels, and several other physiological characteristics that allow
diagnosis of health problems. These sensors are often worn on or im-
planted in the body, or installed in the environment. Additionally, these
sensors also include actuators that can trigger actions such as the re-
lease of small quantities of pharmaceutical drugs into the bloodstream,
or the electrical stimulation of brain areas (e.g. those implicated in
conditions such as Alzheimers disease and Parkinson disease or those
associated with depression). Finally, there are also non-intrusive, but
wearable sensors that capture the motion of the body during its execu-
tion of different activities. Research in the wearable computing commu-
nity has shown that characteristic movement patterns for activities such
as running, walking or lying can effectively be inferred from body-worn
accelerometers.
Ubiquitous healthcare has also relied heavily on the construction of
smart environments
where the environment itself is instrumented to cap-
ture the user behavior and their interaction with the external world.
This includes several Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags and
readers because of their durability, small size, and low costs. There is
significant use of infrared sensors as well as video cameras and other
sensors for motion detection, image processing, and control of in-home
devices. Some environments also employ ultrasonic location tracking
sensors, pressure sensors (deployed in various surfaces such as floors
