Touati Farid, Tabish Rohan
Department of Electrical Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar,
J Med Syst. 2013 Jun;37(3):9949. doi: 10.1007/s10916-013-9949-0. Epub 2013 May 3.
With the increase of an ageing population and chronic diseases, society becomes more health conscious and patients become "health consumers" looking for better health management. People's perception is shifting towards patient-centered, rather than the classical, hospital-centered health services which has been propelling the evolution of telemedicine research from the classic e-Health to m-Health and now is to ubiquitous healthcare (u-Health). It is expected that mobile & ubiquitous Telemedicine, integrated with Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), have a great potential in fostering the provision of next-generation u-Health. Despite the recent efforts and achievements, current u-Health proposed solutions still suffer from shortcomings hampering their adoption today. This paper presents a comprehensive review of up-to-date requirements in hardware, communication, and computing for next-generation u-Health systems. It compares new technological and technical trends and discusses how they address expected u-Health requirements. A thorough survey on various worldwide recent system implementations is presented in an attempt to identify shortcomings in state-of-the art solutions. In particular, challenges in WBAN and ubiquitous computing were emphasized. The purpose of this survey is not only to help beginners with a holistic approach toward understanding u-Health systems but also present to researchers new technological trends and design challenges they have to cope with, while designing such systems.
随着老龄化人口和慢性病数量的增加，社会对健康的关注度日益提高，患者成为寻求更好健康管理的“健康消费者”。人们的观念正朝着以患者为中心转变，而非传统的以医院为中心的医疗服务，这推动了远程医疗研究从经典的电子健康向移动健康发展，如今又迈向泛在医疗（u-Health）。预计与无线体域网（WBAN）集成的移动与泛在远程医疗在促进下一代泛在医疗的提供方面具有巨大潜力。尽管近期付出了努力并取得了成果，但当前提出的泛在医疗解决方案仍存在一些缺陷，阻碍了它们如今的应用。本文全面综述了下一代泛在医疗系统在硬件、通信和计算方面的最新要求。比较了新的技术和技术趋势，并讨论了它们如何满足预期的泛在医疗要求。对全球近期各种系统实现进行了全面调查，试图找出现有解决方案中的缺陷。特别强调了无线体域网和泛在计算中的挑战。本次调查的目的不仅是帮助初学者以整体的方式理解泛在医疗系统，还向研究人员展示他们在设计此类系统时必须应对的新技术趋势和设计挑战。
