Health Informatics: Unobtrusive Physiological Measurement Technologies

Summary form only given. Health informatics deals with the acquisition, transmission, processing, storage, and retrieval of information to enhance the quality and efficiency of healthcare such that it becomes personalized, preventive, predictive, pre-emptive, participatory, pervasive, and precise. A major direction in health informatics is to research and develop technologies that enable the identification of health issues at an early stage. This often requires novel and innovative approaches that can be launched for mass surveillance of a large population. Sensing and analysis of physiological signals remains to be one of the core techniques in clinical screening. Many physiological parameters, such as blood pressure, have been proven to be key risk factors of diseases. With recent advancements in sensors and communication networks, measurement of these parameters does not have to be limited to the short periods an individual spent during ad-hoc infrequent clinic visits. Rather, low-cost sensors can be worn by individuals or integrated into the living environment such that health can be managed unobtrusively for extensively long periods. Substantial technical challenges remain to be solved before these methods can be adopted into routine clinical practice, e.g., to invent new sensing principles enabling the unobtrusive monitoring of physiological and health conditions, to ensure the security and privacy of health information from the sensor to system levels to seamlessly connect the sensors of a user to a body sensor network, as well as to design a framework architecture for the overall e-Health services.