Special Issue on Pervasive Healthcare

摘要

Pervasive healthcare is emerging both as a solution to many existing healthcare problems such as significant number of medical errors, considerable stress on healthcare providers, and partial coverage of healthcare services in rural and underserved areas worldwide, and as an opportunity to provide better healthcare services to an increasing number of people using limited financial and human resources. Pervasive healthcare can be defined as healthcare to anyone, anytime, and anywhere by removing locational, time and other restraints while increasing both the coverage and quality of healthcare. The broad definition includes prevention, healthcare maintenance and checkups, short-term monitoring (or home healthcare monitoring), long-term monitoring (nursing home), personalized healthcare monitoring, incidence detection and management, and, emergency intervention, transportation and treatment. With an increasing cost of healthcare services and an exponential increase in the number of seniors and retirees in developed countries have created several major challenges for policy makers, healthcare providers, hospitals, insurance companies and patients. Pervasive healthcare is considered a solution to many of these problems as well as a possible future of healthcare services. To make the vision of pervasive healthcare a reality, we organized this special issue of MONET. The issue includes significantly expanded versions of best papers from First Pervasive Healthcare Conference and also from the open call for papers.