A Real-time Health Monitoring System for Evaluating Environmental Exposures

Abstract

Several recent studies have addressed the topic of “exposome”, an approach for evaluating environmental exposures and their influence on human health conditions. Environmental exposures affecting human health range from a combination of factors like air pollution, tobacco smoke, and pollen, to climate, such as heat and humidity. With continued advances in information technology, and the worldwide deployment of mobile and wireless networks, patients’ health conditions can be continuously monitored by numerous intelligent devices. Sensors can be integrated into their mobile devices such as smart phones for continuous health assistance and disease attack prevention. However, researchers must overcome many challenges, such as data acquisition, data scales and data uncertainty, in order to evaluate environmental exposures. In this paper, we propose a framework for a generic health monitoring system for modeling and analyzing individual exposure to environmental triggers. We propose to integrate a wide range of individual exposures using wireless sensors and mobile devices for exposure assessment. This paper provides a solid framework by considering asthma as a specific case and presents challenges and opportunities in developing a data management system for continuously changing data and algorithms for evaluating environmental exposures.