My Home Is My Hospital on Recent Research on Health-Enabling Technologies

During the last years there has been considerable progress in the area of health-enabling and ambient assistive technologies (HEAAT). Based on HEAAT, there is the chance that health care and preventive health will more and more take place again in a person's home. The objective of this essay is to report about this progress and to point out and discuss consequences, mainly by referring to a publication in the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2016 about "Health-Enabling and Ambient Assistive Technologies: Past, Present, Future". As a person's home is becoming an important additional 'institution' for health care, new forms of care will have to be implemented with consequences that diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, offered by health care institutions, will not end at their 'walls'. Through HEAAT we now have received new 'informatics diagnostics' and new 'informatics therapeutics', which might be called engymetric diagnosis and engymetrictherapy. Engymetry, technically based on HEAATand on transinstitutional health information systems, isone of the most promising fields of informatics, helping to contribute to high quality care through new diagnostic and therapeutic opportunities and to a good quality of life for the people on our planet.