A pervasive health system integrating patient monitoring, status logging and social sharing

In this paper, we present the design and development of a pervasive health system enabling self-management of chronic patients during their everyday activities. The proposed system integrates patient health monitoring, status logging for capturing various problems or symptoms met, and social sharing of the recorded information within the patients community, aiming to facilitate disease management. A prototype is implemented on a mobile device illustrating the feasibility and applicability of the presented work by adopting unobtrusive vital signs monitoring through a wearable multi-sensing device, a service oriented architecture for handling communication issues, and popular micro-blogging services. Furthermore, a study has been conducted with 16 hypertensive patients, in order to investigate the user acceptance, the usefulness, and the virtue of the proposed system. The results show that the system is welcome by the chronic patients who are especially willing to share healthcare information, and easy to learn and use, while its features have been overall regarded by the patients as helpful for their disease management and treatment.