Home elderly monitoring network built by smart-phone applications

Abstract

Improvements in information technology and reliability of web based applications along with availability of mobile devices with high computational power, capacious memories, high-resolution displays and open operating systems that encourage application development, have provided a suitable foundation for collecting, analyzing and delivering patients’ vital data through health care applications as well as a reliable platform for establishing a portal to facilitate health care services. The capabilities of smart mobile devices have empowered realization of cheap yet high performing web-enabled solutions. The usage simplicity and availability of these smart devices have made them very well suited for home monitoring and care services of elderly and chronically ill population.. The goal of this paper is to perform a case study on elderly community as well as patients with chronic diseases, to investigate the impacts and potential risks of Mobile Health Care Monitoring and patient centered health applications on their lives. The results and at a later stage the conclusion of this research are based on interviews which were conducted on elderly people with or without chronic diseases, developers who had a background in eHealth, and doctors with experiences within eHealth services. The interviewees were selected from different countries in order to obtain information from a broader audience using similar services. This study covers health and technical risks associated to home monitoring networks and eHealth care services from different aspects.