1st International ICST Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

Research Article

A Taxonomy of Pervasive Healthcare Systems

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/PCTHEALTH.2006.361680,
        author={Joanna Alicja  Muras and Vinny  Cahill and Emma Katherine  Stokes},
        title={A Taxonomy of Pervasive Healthcare Systems},
        proceedings={1st International ICST Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={PERVASIVEHEALTH},
        year={2007},
        month={5},
        keywords={Communications technology  Educational institutions  Intelligent sensors  Medical services  Monitoring  Pervasive computing  Psychology  Smart homes  Switches  Taxonomy},
        doi={10.1109/PCTHEALTH.2006.361680}
    }
    
  • Joanna Alicja Muras
    Vinny Cahill
    Emma Katherine Stokes
    Year: 2007
    A Taxonomy of Pervasive Healthcare Systems
    PERVASIVEHEALTH
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/PCTHEALTH.2006.361680
Joanna Alicja Muras1,*, Vinny Cahill1,*, Emma Katherine Stokes2,*
  • 1: Distributed Systems Group, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland
  • 2: Department of Physiotherapy, School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Trinity Centre for Health Sciences, James’s Street, Dublin 8, Ireland
*Contact email: osinskaj@cs.tcd.ie, vinny.cahill@cs.tcd.ie, estokes@tcd.ie

Abstract

Pervasive computing is a developing area. Due to significant technological developments, assistive devices that were impossible to make or that were not even considered for manufacture are now available. The creation of novel smart environments, context-aware assistive devices, and activity monitoring systems have the capacity to provide people with great opportunities to improve their quality of life and increase independence in daily living. These advances in information and communications technology run in parallel to developments in medicine, physiotherapy and psychology. To enable the design of increasingly advanced user-centred systems, dialogue between computer scientists and health care professionals is mandatory. In order to create a framework for dialogue, this paper presents a novel taxonomy of pervasive health care systems. The taxonomy extends the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, which provides standard language and a framework for the description of health and health-related domains. The taxonomy is structured as a hierarchy of the properties of pervasive healthcare systems and can be used as a framework for system classification. It identifies a set of fundamental properties that enable a system to be described according to its user's characteristics, its purpose and environment of use, as well as the technologies employed.