Spatial Health Systems

In this paper it is suggested to draw a dichotomy among health applications: on the one hand there are health information systems which provide means for dealing with health information, on the other hand there are spatial health applications which provide technical support for the elderly and disabled people. While the former enables health organisations to interchange information and provide patients information about health care, the latter directly supports patients in managing their everyday life. Discussing issues about spatial health applications from the computational point of view a problem is identified. Being grounded on measurements of the spatiotemporal change of objects and especially of people, i.e. their locomotion, spatial health applications are in need of formalisms which are capable of dealing with imprecise spatial information. A computational framework shows how imprecise spatial information can be dealt with so that the locomotion problem gets tractable. Moreover, this framework aids in analysing and designing spatial health applications