Selfcare through e-Health Services

Life has become very fast and consequently time is getting short. Every day there is long list of things to do but our routine task list never ends. We don’t have time for many important things e.g. healthcare and many of us can not afford to wait for appointments and spend hours in long waiting queues for basic health screening services available at hospitals and clinics. It would be great if no one needs to wait perhaps for monitoring health related medical issues - diabetes, infertility, allergies, cramps, migraines, fatigue, blood pressure, and many others; life would be much safer and easier. For routine check-up in hospital, patient might need to wait for a couple of hours or even more for even a minute diagnosis e.g. Electrocardiogram (ECG). For years, in emergency situation medical care services for a patient were based on manually measuring vital signs, documenting assessments on paper, and communicating over hand-held radios. Even though many advanced medical procedures and equipments are in place and that has made medical diagnosis significantly easy, efficient and more accurate but time factor is still there; moreover patient can only avail medical services at designated places where equipments and service providers are available. In critical health conditions, patients need quality health care services as quickly as possible regardless of his location without unnecessary delays. One possible solution to avoid unnecessary delays is self healthcare and current recession time has made it more significant to save some money also.

Nowadays many advance healthcare monitoring devices are available in market and quality of their services is also improving with the passage of time. But why many people still don’t go for purchasing those self-healthcare monitoring devices even though they can play important role in monitoring and managing their health issues. Very obvious reason is the complexity involved in using those devices. Why should I enter my healthcare data in excel sheet everyday when I can write it on a plain piece of paper? From last one month I am trying to watch my eating habits and keeping record of intake calories, I have an excel sheet on my computer for keeping records but I am unable to use it frequently in my everyday routine because I don't carry my computer all the time and sometimes I completely forget. However I carry my mobile phone with me most of the time. There is great margin of work which can be done in making the life easy of healthcare devices' users by making device usage altogether simple and flexible. For instance consider following case:

Laura is a software engineer and she is 33 years old; she spends most of her time in front of computer, developing software systems for her company. She has to work late hours to tackle excessive workload. Due to her unhealthy life style, she has been diagnosed with enlarged heart issue and this can lead to heart failure. She has purchased Electrocardiogram (ECG) sensory device for heartbeat monitoring (which can be connected to a gateway device s.a. cellular phone/PDA through WIFI/Infrared/Bluetooth) for running ECG service. She is using a bundle of e-Health services for keeping record online, analysing data, sharing her data to trusted groups of buddies (friends or doctor or nurse etc) and sending SOS message to buddies automatically in case of emergency and contacting nearest healthcare centre. One day when she was working in office alone, she felt pain in her left arm; she launched the e-Health Service on her cell phone and wore the sensory device(s). After successful connection of cell phone with sensory device, she ran a basic analysis report, online application gathered the data which was collected by sensory device and processed it to generate a report; result compiled in few seconds and showed a report. Application would suggest different work options (saving data, sharing data with buddy/buddies e.g. doctor, or sending SOS message) depending on settings of application behaviour. Let’s suppose Laura had configured application for an advance work model and application showed her status in risk zone based on gathered data and preliminary data settings. Risk zone means Laura’s heartbeat was some points above the risky threshold value (which she has set after consulting her doctor). In case of heart attack, application would ask Laura if she wants to send SOS message to her buddies group, and if she doesn't disable emergency alarm and after she is found in motionless state for quite long time an SOS signal would be send to her trusted buddies and to the nearest healthcare centre (Ambulance\Clinic\Hospital) for emergency rescue as per application settings.

This is just one example, a variety of simple/advance work models can be defined/selected depending on user requirements. Users can define their own new personalised e-Health services (monitoring hormones level) or customise the existing ones (e.g. setting up application for saving data at your USP or computer with in gateway device range). Many other domain specific services can be made available on a generic service platform; a platform which eases the processes of defining, designing and publishing such services.