Home-Based Health Monitoring and Measurement for Personalised Healthcare

The Internet influences many aspects of our lives. We use online banking to manage our financial affairs, travel websites to book our holidays, satellite navigation systems to plan our journeys, and many other Internet-based applied computing systems for a wide variety of tasks. A natural outcome of the progress in such systems is a move towards systems dedicated to personalised healthcare. For example, many of us are beginning to connect mobile phones to sensing devices attached to our bodies, such as Electrocardiography (ECG) sensors, to monitor our fitness levels. Additionally, wireless defibrillators help us to observe the blood pressure of patients remotely and send information to medical practitioners. However, despite the obvious benefits, there is little evidence of widespread exploitation of these technologies. This is mainly due to a lack of conclusive data from clinical trials on their effectiveness to monitor and measure illness. Furthermore, the transition, to web based monitoring systems, presents a significant shift from current practice and the delivery of healthcare services. The solution is not obvious, but clearly, dealing with illnesses that often occur over months or years in contrast to days, and weeks will require an alternative and more sustainable approach. Detecting the onset of an illness early enough and personalising treatment is likely to have a high and positive impact on people's lives and healthcare providers, i.e., to improve the health of people and reduce health service costs. This paper explores this idea further and presents some successful working prototype systems to demonstrate the applicability of personalising healthcare.