Within the Personal Healthcare Systems (PHS) cluster,
various applications for personal healthcare and healthy
training are studied and developed.
The Personal Healthcare Systems cluster creates
architectures and systems for personal healthcare, with
a strong application focus. User-centered design ensures
that user requirements are elicited early in the design
process, resulting in patient-centric solutions. At the
same time, innovative solutions take the underlying
business models explicitly into account.
- Managing complexity. Personal healthcare
systems are often inherently distributed over multiple
devices and owners. Besides, these systems typically
require integration of multiple technical domains, and
understanding of many aspects of personal healthcare.
To handle this complexity, a combination is used of
peer-to-peer technologies, interoperability solutions
and standardization patterns.
- Partnering. The PHS cluster partners with
research groups inside and outside of Philips to
obtain knowledge of the human body, physiology and
psychological processes. For example, the cluster
participates in the IST MyHeart and HeartCycle projects.
- Evolving domain. Over the last years,
personal health and well-being have increased in
importance within society. The main causes are the
rising costs of medical treatment, caused by an aging
community, and a growing consumer awareness of disease
risks. The aim of the PHCS cluster is to create
systems that support patients/consumers to live
healthy lives or to manage their disease while
residing outside traditional healthcare institutions.
- Scope. The diagram above indicates the
research scope. Next to consumers, system design
explicitly deals with other stakeholders, like
doctors, nurses at care centers, home care personnel,
dieticians, trainers, and coaches. Applications that
are related to health care are also restricted by
medical regulations. Typical applications vary from
stand-alone on-body systems with direct feedback to
the user, to distributed systems that consist of
sensor networks, personal or home hubs, and clusters
of back-end services.
- Projects. The PHS cluster works on various
subjects within the personal healthcare domain. To help people with chronic
diseases, the cluster develops tele-monitoring
facilities that enable these patients to live at home,
and maintain their own life style. Another focus area is to support
people in increasing their physical activity by using personal devices
like activity monitor and a web application that
provides tailored advice. Another example is
a smart personal trainer that optimizes a person
fitness experience, aiding the user in maintaining or
achieving a healthy lifestyle. In addition to these
application-specific projects, we also have projects
that focus on more architectural aspects of
next-generation health care systems.
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White paper on Personal Healthcare (coming soon)
