Proactive health care underpinned by embedded and mobile technologies

This paper describes the use of embedded information and mobile communication technologies to tackle one impending global concern, namely, the aging and health care problem. As the population ages, chronic diseases also become rampant, leading to mounting medical socio-economical burdens. Moreover, old people and patients are often confined to a relatively small space, so that their whereabouts can be tracked. The situation can be rectified with the ingenious combination of embedded information devices and mobile communication capability. We have implemented a system that embodies these technologies. It can take vital physiological data of a user and communicate the data together with location information to a backend server for processing and may trigger necessary actions. The process can take place anywhere, any time, and give great freedom to system users. We describe the system architecture, address practical implementation issues, and present some performance results.