A blueprint for pervasive self-care infrastructures

Abstract

Self care is a recent initiative by the Department of Health in the UK that aims to treat patients with long-term conditions sooner, nearer to home and earlier in the course of their disease. To this end, it places the point-of-care in the community and often at the patients' own home. In this paper we discuss the building blocks of pervasive self care, a ubiquitous computing service infrastructure that can play a critical role in supporting patients with long tern conditions to manage their case. This service employs computing elements embedded in the home environment and the body so as to provide context-aware case management. The proposed architecture brings together islands of pervasive computing functionality into an integrated end-to-end architecture. In doing so, it aims to introduce a generic reference model for the delivery of pervasive self-care services that can help limit the considerable amount of duplication in current work in this field