Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOSDescription:
The growing aging people coupled with the rise in the incidence of people living in chronic health conditions is creating an unsustainable burden on health and social care services. On the other hand, mobile technologies have been impressively growing in most countries for the last years, as greater efforts are devoted into research work in this area. And mobile phones are not an important tool only in urban regions, more and more people from rural areas are making use of them.
On the other hand, wireless systems provide “anytime and anywhere” services, al- lowing data entered somewhere else to be accessed by the healthcare professionals at the point of care. It also provides a way to remotely monitor a patient. This is extremely important as it allows patient mobility and efficient response in emergency situations. New applications and industries will continue to address healthcare issues in the coming years and wireless monitors will be commonly used in hospitals and for home monitoring.
This project aims to make some improvement in this still gapped-area, by studying the available technologies and combine them to develop a solution that will provide people a way to monitor their heart and lung functions everyday, taking greater care on their health status. The solution will allow people to perform daily tests and build a history of results which will be shared with health care professionals. By doing this, we will give an important contribution in the prevention of serious diseases, through early diagnosis.
In this dissertation, a review of the state of the art of m-Health systems is presented, including the theoretical background, the available technologies and existing related work in this area. The problems that this research tried to solve in the context of a project undertaken in Fraunhofer Portugal research center are also presented as well as a solution approach and some results.
Author: João Silva
Type: MSc thesis
Partner: Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto
Year: 2011