Electronic house calls: high-tech medicine at your doorstep

The traditional healthcare system is characterized by hospital or clinic-based face-to-face contacts between the patient and care provides, which frequently occur at times and locations that are inconvenient or difficult for the patient. The healthcare delivery in the future needs to be provided in a distributed, patient-centered manner. The distributed diagnosis and home healthcare (D2H2) will benefit patients, particularly those with chronic disease, e.g., diabetes, arthritis, and high blood pressure, by improving the quality, convenience and efficiency of care, reducing the healthcare cost, and preventing medical errors, thus leading to increasing access to affordable and effective healthcare. There are many important components to make the D2H2 vision a reality: (1) physiological measurement and point-of-care diagnostic devices that can be used at the place where the patient is, e.g., home and nursing home, (2) a home-based controller, (3) communications and networking, (4) databases, Web servers and services, (5) biomedical informatics, (6) intelligent agents, and (7) system integration, reliability and security. We believe that the paradigm change from central, hospital-based to distributed, patient-centered, home-based healthcare delivery is inevitable. There are many opportunities for engineers and scientists to innovate and contribute to this 21st century healthcare system.