A Novel Approach to Developing Applications in the Pervasive Healthcare Environment through the Use of Archetypes

Pervasive Healthcare focuses on the use of new technologies, tools, and services, to help patients to play a more active role in the treatment of their conditions. Pervasive Healthcare environments demand a huge amount of information exchange, and specific technologies has been proposed to provide interoperability between the systems that comprise such environments. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to fully adopt them and to migrate Centered Healthcare Environments to Pervasive Healthcare Environments. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach to develop applications in the Pervasive Healthcare environment, through the use of Archetypes. This approach was demonstrated and evaluated in a controlled experiment that we conducted in the cardiology department of a hospital located in the city of Marília (São Paulo, Brazil). An application was developed to evaluate this approach, and the results showed that the approach is suitable for facilitating the development of healthcare systems by offering generic and powerful approach capabilities.