Evolving pervasive health research into clinical practice.

Abstract

Correspondence to: Dr. Oscar Mayora CREATE-NET Via alla Cascata 56D Trento, 38123 Italy E-mail: oscar.mayora@create-net.org During the past years there has been a growing research trend on investigating the use of pervasive computing technologies for their use in the healthcare domain. The research activity on this topic known as “Pervasive Health”, has been defined as a scientific discipline integrating the technological advances on pervasive computing, the research on human-computer interaction and their application in the medical and wellbeing domains [1]. From its origin around a decade ago, Pervasive Health research has been evolv ing from the development of experimental proof-of-concept prototypes tested under limited pilot tests, into more robust systems able to satisfactorily perform in reallife conditions including a considerable amount of users for validation [2]. From a technology and users-acceptance point of view, previous Pervasive Health research has assessed various ways to maximize usefulness in treatment and care management and on users adoption. The question arising then is that if these technologies have proven to provide a real potential benefit, why don’t we see them yet as part of today’s mainstream healthcare provisioning practice? Which barriers still need to be overcome in order to implement Pervasive Health? Today, Pervasive Health research has achieved a maturity level that allows encouraging current developers and researchers to perform a quality step ahead by identifying the ways to integrate the lessons learnt in this discipline into the actual paths of healthcare provisioning. The implementation of Pervasive Health into clinical practice opens a new series of challenges that imply the need of conducting more intensive multidisciplinary research involving fields that in the past were considered less relevant to this topic. The new trends of Pervasive Health incorporate the traditional joint approach between pervasive computing and interactive technologies, the need of intensifying the relationship with clinical practitioners in a more structured and rigorous way than in previous years. It is not sufficient anymore to create novel ways of applying technology to prevention and treatment confined to labsettings, but the use of technology needs today to show a clear, measurable evidence of the advantages of Pervasive Health into actual clinical environments while contributing to medical science in a formal way. The future of Pervasive Health developments will need to incorporate from early design phases how solutions will cope with non-functional implementation constraints [3]. The clinical validity of new technology-based treatments will be a necessary condition to enable operation in real-life medical domain including all the relevant implications of conducting clinical research. Such implications include incorporation of legal aspects, ethical considerations, regulatory issues and all necessary conditions to permit inclusion of new technologies into healthcare with the assurance to patients and clinicians of secure and high quality level of treatment. Moreover, the amount of data useful for clinical prac-