TOTAL HEALTH: Toward Continuous Personal Monitoring

Abstract. Ubiquitous personal monitoring of health is being rapidly devel-oped in recent years. However the concept of pervasive computing in health-care focuses on individual systems. We propose that Total Health is the transformation of healthcare that aims for complete 24/7 coverage in which no one system can provide. We discuss what are the challenges that come with bringing technology into widespread use. Following this discussion, a se-lection of current applications in healthcare is presented. These applications use state-of-the-art systems that relate to personal health monitoring with the goal of providing a 24/7 picture of one’s health. The key requirements of these systems is that they provide continuous available monitoring, must be as unobtrusive as possible, require as little human intervention as possible, identify and alert health risks, and be cost effective. 1 The Total Health Concept We begin by defining a number of important concepts and then we describe what Total Health means