As life expectancy in the industrialized world increases, so does the number of elders with chronic health conditions such as diabetes and congestive heart failure that require complex self-management routines. The traditional model of episodic care in clinic and hospital-based settings is not optimal for improving chronic disease outcomes. To solve such issues, we are acquiring tools to conduct continuous monitoring of people’s everyday lives, called pervasive health devices. Likewise, we are getting Web/mobile applications that analyze and visualize the data from pervasive health devices for users are called as pervasive health applications.
However, existing pervasive health devices and applications pose the following challenges to be effective in practice. First, they lack caregivers’ connection and feedback. Due to the absences, people tend to lose their interests in using devices quickly and they do not receive professional advice on their health. More importantly, the existing pervasive systems are designed closed and vertically-integrated, thereby impeding the development of sophisticated pervasive health applications for complex, multi-factorial disease and health conditions. Furthermore, the closed systems complicate unified management of pervasive health devices.
In this talk, I introduce a closed-loop system to solve the challenges in pervasive healthcare. The closed-loop consists of multiple software and hardware components through which device users receive in-depth remote cares and caregivers minimize the time and cost spent for healthcare. After I introduce the overall concept of closed-loop design and the potential impacts that it can make on caregivers and device users, I focus on HealthOS: a platform to develop pervasive health applications and also a core system to integrate all other components in our close-loop. Specifically, I describe how HealthOS simplifies application development and integrates heterogeneous hardware and software components, as well as its impact on pervasive healthcare.
Speaker Biography
Jong Hyun Lim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University and also a member of the Hopkins InterNetworking Research Group (HiNRG) led by his adviser, Dr. Andreas Terzis. His interest includes protocol design, system support, and target localization for healthcare systems.