P
ERVASIVE
H
EALTHCARE
Healthcare applications developed in a smart
community decrease the community residents’
dependence on special caregivers and reduces
their healthcare expenses through more efficient
use of community healthcare resources and ear-
lier detection of life-threatening emergency situ-
ations. To make an accurate and quick
emergency response, the applications rely on
continuous monitoring of the environmental
conditions and the body status of community
residents provided by wireless body sensors
deployed around the human body. The smart
community environment then provides a seam-
less wireless connection from every location
within the community at which the residents
reside to nearby healthcare givers living in the
same community and remote healthcare insti-
tutes.
In a smart community environment, elders
and people with cognitive/physical disabilities
receive healthcare services any time for any
event, and little children and babies are cared
for in a more secure way while their parents
are not nearby. When an emergency occurs,
being detected/reported by body sensors, home
surveillance systems, or an onlooking passerby,
the emergency information and other relevant
data such as body sensor readings and personal
health information (PHI) are instantly sent
through the community network to nearby
healthcare workers who are able to offer the
most proper first aid, and service calls are
Figure 3.
Suspicious event detection in neighborhood watch: a) a cluster of
smart homes, marked by small dots and surrounded by circles indicating their
surveillance range, are tracking a suspicious event, represented by a star; b) the
event movement trace identified by the community surveillance network is a
multi-stage curve of space-time points. The contour line on the space plane in
(b) corresponds to the physical path of the event, which is the blue line in (a).
Space
(b)
(a)
Time
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