1536-1268/07/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE ■ Published by the IEEE Computer Society PERVASIVEcomputing 17

PervasiveComputing inHealthcare

Pervasive computing is often mentionedin the context of improving healthcare.Usually, these examples involve con-sumer monitoring devices such as bloodpressure cuffs and glucose meters that

can upload data to a personal computer for collec-tion and dissemination to professional caregivers.

By collecting patient data in set-tings more varied than doctors’offices, healthcare providershope to better understand themany facets of patients’ dailylives and then modify therapiesto the individual.

Another important contextis emergency care to accelerateaccess to medical records at theemergency site or to bring ex-perts to the scene virtually. Bygiving medical professionals ap-propriate, complete informa-

tion, we expect to deliver better care that’s tunednot only to the situation but also to the patient’shistory.

The surgical field also receives much attention,as surgeons and nurses must monitor and con-trol various vital functions under intensely stress-ful conditions. Technologists are developing sys-tems to collect and process an ever-increasing

range of telemetry from instruments used in anoperating room and to augment human abilityto detect patterns of concern that could requireimmediate action.

A promising futureMany of these applications have appeared in the

popular press and are actually starting to be de-ployed. At one end of the spectrum, consumerdevices easily network with home PCs to let usersgather data from sensors in the home that theirphysicians can access online. At the other end,telesurgery is becoming a practical reality, withremote physicians able to consult on a patient’s con-dition as well as take part in a surgical procedure.

This special issue seeks to go beyond these“expected” applications and bring the reader aneven wider range of applicability for pervasivecomputing technologies in the highly variedhealthcare domain.

Proponents tout pervasive computing as ben-efiting healthcare in at least three ways:

• lowering costs by getting appropriate care tothe people who need it much faster than pre-viously possible;

• making expert care accessible to more people,thereby increasing the scale at which first-ratehealthcare is applied; and

G U E S T E D I T O R S ’ I N T R O D U C T I O N

Gaetano Borriello University of Washington

Vince StanfordNational Institute of Standards and Technology

Chandra NarayanaswamiIBM Research

Walter MenningMayo Clinic

18 PERVASIVEcomputing www.computer.org/pervasive

G U E S T E D I T O R S ’ I N T R O D U C T I O N

• making healthcare more personalized,prompting individuals to take moreresponsibility for maintaining theirhealth.

In realizing this promise, we’ll have toradically improve the many technologiesthat constitute pervasive computing:from how we collect data to sensing de-

vices to how we present information. Aswe explore new applications, we’re find-ing important challenges that we, astechnologists, must address to eventu-ally make systems that help the greatmajority of the world’s population. Thatmeans looking beyond acute care to thefull range of afflictions that make lifechallenging for many people.

In this issueThe five articles in this special issue

will give you a sense of the expandingapplication of pervasive computing tech-nologies in healthcare. They span a rangeof ages—from childhood to old age—and locations—from hospitals to homesand everything in between.

“Ubiquitous Psychotherapy,” byMarco de Sá, Luís Carriço, and PedroAntunes, is a case in point. Mobile tech-nology supports cognitive behavioraltherapy via a PDA that helps a therapistcustomize coaching help for a particularpatient. It also lets that patient provideinput to the therapist throughout theday. Together, they can then analyze theinteractions, which helps the patientrecall his or her difficulties and gives thetherapist a better, more detailed view ofwhat actually happened in a particularsituation. This application builds on theexperience-sampling method popular-ized in user-centered design.

In “Pervasive Computing and Autism:Assisting Caregivers of Children withSpecial Needs,” Julie A. Kientz, GillianR. Hayes, Tracy L. Westeyn, Thad Star-ner, and Gregory D. Abowd apply a suiteof data-gathering technologies to helpeducators of children with autism. Theydescribe how these technologies captureimportant aspects of the sessions be-tween caregivers and the children. Be-sides facilitating assessment, this easilysearchable record can help caregiverscollectively tune methods and informeach other of a particular child’s needs.

“Distributed Healthcare: Simultane-ous Assessment of Multiple Individuals,”by Tamara L. Hayes, Misha Pavel, AndreGustavo Adami, Nicole Larimer, IshanA. Tsay, and John Nutt, tackles the prac-tical problems of evaluating elderly pa-tients in their own homes. They examinegait analysis and the system necessary tomeasure gait in a real home occupied bymultiple people. The authors present acomplete system, from sensors to visual-

the GUEST EDITORSGaetano Borriello is a professor of computer science and engineering at the Uni-versity of Washington, where he has been on the faculty since received his PhD fromUC Berkeley. In 2001, he founded Intel Research Seattle, where he launched the labon applications of ubiquitous computing technology to health care and elder care,in particular. His research interests include location-based systems, sensor-based in-ferencing, and tagging objects with passive and active tags. He serves on the IEEEPervasive Computing editorial board. Contact him at gaetano@cs.washington.edu;www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gaetano.

Vince Stanford manages the Smart Space project for the National Institute of Stan-dards and Technology's Information Technology Laboratory in its Information AccessDivision. His research interests include distributed sensor networks, sensor fusion,speech recognition, speaker identification, speech quality measurement, array basedauto-directive speech signal acquisition, and video person tracking. He received his BAin Mathematics from Indiana University. He lead development of the NIST Smart DataFlow System middleware for sensor data acquisition and transport as well as the NISTMk-III microphone array. These open software and hardware platforms are used bygovernment, commercial, and academic R&D labs worldwide to capture multi-

modal sensor data bases and to integrate technologies for beamforming, bearing estimation, sourcelocalization, speaker, face, and speech recognition, using audio, video, and sensor fusion techniques. He’sa principal investigator on the NIST Single Molecule Measurement and Manipulation Program developingstatistical methods for state identification and decoding in single molecule systems using unsupervisedHidden Markov Modeling. He was previously the lead engineer for the IBM Spoken Language SystemsGroup and developed award winning IBM continuous speech recognition products. He obtained severalpatents on speech recognition techniques including word spotting, signal processing, and spoken inter-face. He’s a member of the IEEE. Contact him at vincent.stanford@nist.gov.

Chandra Narayanaswami manages a group on technologies for client computingat IBM Research. He led the IBM Research effort on developing the WatchPad, a highfunction wristwatch computer. He also helped develop novel concepts such as theSoulPad and the Personal Mobile Hub and worked on high-performance graphicssystems. He received his PhD in computer and systems engineering from RensselaerPolytechnic Institute. He has received 24 Invention Achievement Awards and an Out-standing Technical Achievement from IBM, and he holds 45 US patents. He was thegeneral chair for the 7th IEEE Symposium on Wearable Computers in 2003 and hasalso served on program committees for several ACM/IEEE conferences on pervasive

computing, media, and low power systems. He serves on the editorial boards for IEEE Pervasive Comput-ing and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. He’s a senior member of the IEEE. Contact him atchandras@us.ibm.com.

Walter Menning is the Vice Chairman for Information Services at Mayo Clinic. Heshares responsibility for leadership of the Information Services organization, whichprovides application development and support for Mayo Clinic’s integrated clinicalsystems initiative; clinical support systems; laboratory, pathology and extramural ap-plications; and administrative applications. The Information Services organizationalso provides technical and infrastructure support for Mayo’s Rochester-based datacenters and support services for Mayo’s group practices in Jacksonville, Florida andScottsdale, Arizona through an internal shared services organization. He’s a fellowand past chairman of the Board of Directors of the Healthcare Information and Man-

agement Systems Society (HIMSS). He’s a frequent speaker on topics addressing the effective use ofhealthcare information technology. Contact him at menning@mayo.edu.

ization software, that accomplishes thisdemanding task such that it could be use-ful for large-scale deployment.

We then turn to supporting caregiversmore directly. In “Pervasive ComputingSupport for Hospitals: An Overview ofthe Activity-Based Computing Project,”Jakob E. Bardram and Henrik B. Chris-tensen demonstrate an approach that di-rectly supports the larger-scale activitiesof medical professionals in a hospital setting. Rather than supporting a fine-grained task such as performing a specificprocedure on a patient, the system seeksto support longer-range activities that willlikely involve a team of clinicians andspan a patient’s entire hospital stay.

The last article, a special technologyfeature, discusses a new enabling tech-nology for physiological monitoring.“Conductive-Fabric Garment for aCable-Free Body Area Network,” by EricWade and Harry Asada, describes apromising approach to making a wear-able garment that can interconnect awide range of sensors around a person’sbody. Such technologies will enrich thetoolset that physicians and patients cancount on for continuous telemetry.

Of course, the papers here areonly the start of what has thepromise to be a very impor-tant application space for per-

vasive computing technology—an areathat will affect, and improve, all of ourlives. We look forward to future work bythese authors and the many others em-barking in this exciting direction.

For more information on this or any other comput-ing topic, please visit our Digital Library at www.computer.org/publications/dlib.

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