When Smart Home Meets Pervasive HealthCare Services Using Mobile Devices and Sensor Networks - Status and Issues

In this paper, to deliver healthcare service pervasively, especially to the home space, we first discuss the status and activities on healthcare infrastructures and systems using mobile devices and sensor networks. We also provide the information and illustrate the reasons why home healthcare will be even more hot space in the near future. With the advance of wireless network, mobile devices become more demanding for users to communicate each other either for voice or data service, or both. In addition, as medical record goes to digital form and will be available any where, any time and used by any kind of mobile devices, so that mobile healthcare becomes a hot topic and many issues are currently working on. From the user side point of view, advanced sensing devices and networks based on them provide rich context and seamless connection between users and mobile devices so that the personal data or medical record could be updated as needed and quality of services can be improved. With the help of smart sensors and sensor networks embedded either on body or in the home space, the quality of personal healthcare can be improved in lower cost as well. In this paper, we also address some issues to implement the homebased pervasive healthcare applications and provide a visionary scenario integrating smart home and healthcare services.