2.7. Healthcare
By adding communication capability to devices, patients and elderly
citizens may be able to do simple measurements at home.
Thanks to online devices, a doctor can keep an eye on the patient's
health and receive warnings if a new trend is discovered by automated
filters.
Fine-grained, daily measurements presented in proper ways may allow
the doctor to establish a more precise diagnosis.
Such applications may be realized as wearable products that
frequently do a measurement and automatically deliver the result to a
data sink locally or over the Internet.
Applications falling in this category are referred to as at-home
health reporting. Whether measurements are done in a fixed interval
or they are manually activated, they leave all processing to the
receiving data sink.
A more active category of applications may send an alarm if some
alarm condition is triggered. This category of applications is
referred to as at-home health monitoring. Measurements are
interpreted in the device and may cause reporting of an event if an
alarm is triggered.
Many implementations may overlap both categories.
Since wireless and battery operated systems may never reach 100%
guaranteed operational time, healthcare and security systems will
need a management layer implementing alarm mechanisms for low
battery, report activity, etc.
For instance, if a blood pressure sensor did not report a new
measurement, say five minutes after the scheduled time, some
responsible person must be notified.
The structure and performance of such a management layer is outside
the scope of the routing requirements listed in this document.