The anatomy of pervasive self care services

Self care is a recent initiative by the Department of Health in the UK that aims to treat patients with long-term conditions sooner, nearer to home and earlier in the course of their disease. To achieve this, it places the point-of-care in the community and often at the patients' own home. In this paper we discuss the building blocks of pervasive self care, a ubiquitous computing service infrastructure that can play a critical role in supporting patients with long term conditions to manage their case. This service employs embedded networked computing elements in the home environment, on and in the body, and in medications and consumer electronics to provide context aware case management. The proposed architecture aims to introduce a generic reference model for the delivery of pervasive self care services that can help reduce the considerable amount of duplication in current work in this area.