Designing a Pervasive Healthcare Assistive Environment for the Elderly

Pervasive healthcare is an emerging area with its research intensification in recent years. There are a good number of new projects and many technological advances reported in literature, but the current scenario is still far away from an everyday life fulfilled with pervasive healthcare systems. The main goal of this paper is to present the main design issues of a pervasive healthcare assistive environment, specially designed for the elderly. The system integrates wheelchairs and walkers, as smart objects, and situated displays. The smart objects have embedded sensors to measure physiological parameters. RFID is used to assure user identification within the environment. Additionally, the paper presents preliminary results on the implementation and point out crucial issues for future discussion. Author