HealthNet: A System for Mobile and Wearable Health Information Management

Medical health care is undergoing a significant change of paradigm. Moving health care from health centers to home environments poses new challenges for acquisition, management and mobile exchange of information. The HealthNet project at RWTH Aachen University has developed a prototype which addresses these new challenges: a Body Sensor Network (BSN) collects information about the vital functions of a patient while she is in her home environment; the integration of smart textile sensors increases the acceptability of such technology; mobile communication and data management enables the exchange of health data between patients and doctors; data stream mining techniques tuned for mobile devices provide immediate feedback of the collected data to the user; and finally, advanced security and privacy features increase user acceptance and cope with legal requirements. This paper summarizes the challenges and achievements in the development of this prototype. ∗C. Quix, S. Geisler, X. Li, M. Jarke, and A. Lorenz are with Informatik 5 (Information Systems) at RWTH Aachen University, Germany (geisler,jarke,lixiang,[email protected]). †C. Quix and M. Jarke are also with the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT, St. Augustin, Germany (christoph.quix,[email protected]). ‡J. Barnickel and U. Meyer are with the IT Security group at RWTH Aachen University, Germany (barnickel,[email protected]). §M. Hassani and T. Seidl are with Informatik 9 (Data Management and Exploration) at RWTH Aachen University, Germany (hassani,[email protected]). ¶S. Kim and S. Leonhardt are with the Philips Chair for Medical Information Technology (MedIT) at RWTH Aachen University, Germany (s.kim,[email protected]). ‖T. Quadflieg and T. Gries are with the Institute for Textile Technology (ITA) at RWTH Aachen University, Germany (till.quadflieg,[email protected]).