Management of home healthcare using networked appliances

Advances in technology and the increased use of home medical devices, such as blood glucose meters, blood pressure monitors and heart monitors, will revolutionise the way public healthcare is administered. Homes and their associated networks in conjunction with such devices will take over many mundane healthcare tasks and manage new and enriched lifestyle choices that are at present dramatically affecting our overall quality of life. Through the combination of wireless and fixed networking infrastructures explicit links will form between the home and its devices and external entities such as gymnasiums, hospitals and general practitioner surgeries. Through these interconnected networks new realtime healthcare management system will emerge that continually provide information and react to adverse or unusual medical conditions received from occupants within the home. Each home user will be empowered to influence all aspects of their health where healthcare practitioners are continually informed and only used for more specialised treatments. Here we can see obvious benefits such a system would afford. For example, we can now make decisions about the actions we are considering too try and influence the effects this may have on our long-term health. Whether this is through real-time monitoring or trend analysis we will gain a better understanding of health and lifestyle choices which at present is not possible. Movement towards this vision is already evident. For example, pacemaker technology is well understood and a natural progression would be to make such devices wireless, allowing easy connectivity to home, hospital and healthcare practitioner networks. This will undoubtedly lead to the development of a multitude of other similar devices designed to carry out some medical function to proactively monitor and act upon adverse factors that may threaten the health of a person. Healthcare practitioners will have direct access to these devices where they could be controlled or queried allowing data to be stored, accessed, and used in assessments. Given this use of networked devices home users could even pose questions about their health to potentially millions of networked sensors either insider or outside the body, with each sensor providing information about a particular aspect of a person’s health. Although much work has been done in the home networking and medical device domains separately, there is much to be gained from a convergence of these disciplines to harness the power afforded by networked devices, sensors, wireless technologies and global communication. Doing this will undoubtedly make it easier to monitor, interact and control all aspects of a person’s health through the obvious benefits networking home medical devices will bring. We present a new approach using a working prototype to implement networked medical devices within the home capable of monitoring data received from an individual, which could then be accessed by occupants of the home, hospitals, or general practitioner surgeries.