What is Wireless Health?

Abstract

Recent advances in the electronics industry and wireless communication have enabled innovative domains of applications to evolve. Embedded processors and systems have become widely used in people's everyday life in various applications ranging from mobile communication to automotive industries to medical applications. The groundswell of wellness healthcare programs and patient management emphasize more involvement by patients themselves. This paradigm largely requires that patient information be readily available at the point of care, regardless of which physician the patient sees. The current proliferation of broadband wireless services, along with more powerful and convenient handheld devices, is helping introduce real-time monitoring and guidance for a wide array of patients. Low-cost sensors and wireless systems can now create a constantly vigilant and pervasive monitoring capability at home, at work, and in conventional point-of-care environments [4][5] (e.g., primary care physician offices, outpatient clinics, rehabilitation centers). Indeed, a large research community and a nascent industry is beginning to connect medical care with technology developers, vendors of wireless and sensing hardware systems [1], network service providers, and enterprise data management communities. Wearable devices focusing on personal health, rehabilitation, and early disease detection are now being prototyped. All these have led us to the new notion of "Wireless Health"