Personal and Social Communication Services for Health and Lifestyle Monitoring

The focus of the PAL project is to study how future requirements for healthcare services impact current and future communication infrastructures. Current assisted living scenarios work only in restricted environments and are unable to provide continuous user support. Systems in this space tend to be closed, providing only particular functionality and/or operating on specific infrastructure. Our aim is to deploy appropriate interface and interaction paradigms, regardless of the underlying networking and software technologies, to enable users to achieve self-monitoring and self-management of their lifestyle and health. We also consider the integration of social and professional support networks, while ensuring appropriate access controls. This paper details a layered architecture for supporting a diverse range of care services. We provide an integration framework to demonstrate the practicality of our approach, and present results highlighting design considerations for user-centric care systems. Keywords-self-monitoring; lifestyle; healthcare; privacy; security; communications; networks; middleware