HealthKiosk: A Family-Based Connected Healthcare System for Long-Term Monitoring

In this paper, we present “HealthKiosk”, a family-based healthcare system, to provide rich contextual information and alerting mechanisms for continuous monitoring of health conditions. HealthKiosk significantly improves the reach and quality of regional and community healthcare services, and could potentially minimize the efforts of care professionals for the chronical illness, not only applicable for the elderly but also children and young fitness trainers. The proposed architecture leverages the RESTful design style, nevertheless introducing a novel development of the “sensor proxy”, both in a stationary PC style and as a mobile widget. The sensor proxy behaves not only as a bridge between the raw sensor readings and the kiosk controller, but also as a data processing logic to integrate, correlate, and transform a variety of data from multiple data sources to an integrated XML format. We demonstrate the system performance by showing two complete case studies for both stationary and mobile sensor proxies used in the developed HealthKiosk system. Finally, the proposed solution has been piloted and deployed at the Peking University People’s Hospital (PKUPH) for diabetes patients, via building an evidence-based clinical care solution focusing on chronic disease management in China.