Personalized eHealth: Status and Challenges

By Tsong-Ho Wu, Ph.D., IEEE Fellow, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan

Healthcare is becoming a significant socio-economic challenge around the world. For example, US alone spent about US$2.6 Trillion in 2008 (17% of GDP). Major world developed countries (US, EU and Japan) are promoting a new healthcare model, called personalized healthcare, to control the cost while improving citizens’ health through use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and care focus from treatment to prevention. Personalized healthcare is a healthcare model emphasizing the systematic use of context information about an individual patient to select or optimize that patient’s preventative and therapeutic care. A comprehensive ICT-enabled personalized healthcare solution includes medical sensor-enabled remote monitoring, smart-phone enabled data aggregation, medical situation awareness and analysis (risk classification, root cause analysis and risk triggers), and context-aware coaching that enables solutions for converged disease risk management and patient behavior assistance toward prevention care or prediction of diseases for better disease risk control.

In this talk, we will review a high-level ICT-enabled personalized healthcare system and solution framework and discuss the current status and technology evolution. We will use a cast study of heart disease as an example to illustrate the concept and model of the ICT-enabled personalized healthcare solution framework and technical challenges faced by engineers and researchers.

To find out more about this topic

View the presentation given at HealthCom 11, “The Final Mile: Technology-enabled Personalized Medicine”, 13-15 June, 2011, Columbia, MO, USA

Tsong-Ho Wu is the Chief Technology Officer, Services Systems Technology Center, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan. He is the Chair of the e-Health Technical Committee of the IEEE Communications Society.