Intelligent Paradigms for Assistive and Preventive Healthcare (Studies in Computational Intelligence) : 9783540317623

This book presents some of the recent advances in assistive and preventive healthcare in intelligent environment. As the world is becoming increasingly aware of the needs of people with disabilities, researchers are finding new technologies and applications to assist disabled people in performing the everyday activities which able-bodied people often take for granted.

Ubiquitous healthcare is introduced in terms of technology and service, considering the current technology as well as the future technology and services. In the first section, we introduce the key techniques of ubiquitous healthcare for next-generation medical treatment services. In the second section, we introduce the wireless sensor network (WSN) and ANTS (an Evolvable Network of Tiny Sensors). In the last section, we discuss real-time health-monitoring network for the disabled and elderly people using an inexpensive and effective Web server and health-monitoring sensors in a wrist phone.

The development of high speed Internet technology and by the use of a wireless network enable medical multimedia systems to support numerous data types (video, audio and biological data). This in turn, made it possible to effectively provide medical treatments to the patients remotely and to help prevent disease. Ubiquitous healthcare system can be regarded as the combination of the Internet and biological measuring devices to manage patients’ disease without the limitation of time and space and without resorting to specific types of measuring device. In short, it is an upgraded version of the biological measuring devices with data transmission capability. There is a tendency for the measuring devices to be smaller, able to be attached using wireless, digitized and using less power.