From smart health to smart hospitals

Prolonged life expectancy along with the increasing complexity of medicine and health services raises health costs worldwide dramatically. Advancements in ubiquitous computing applications in combination with the use of sophisticated intelligent sensor networks may provide a basis for help. Whilst the smart health concept has much potential to support the concept of the emerging P4-medicine (preventive, participatory, predictive, and personalized), such high-tech medicine produces large amounts of high-dimensional, weakly-structured data sets and massive amounts of unstructured information. All these technological approaches along with “big data” are turning the medical sciences into a data-intensive science. To keep pace with the growing amounts of complex data, smart hospital approaches are a commandment of the future, necessitating context aware computing along with advanced interaction paradigms in new physical-digital ecosystems. In such a system the medical doctors are supported by their smart mobile medical assistants on managing their floods of data semi-automatically by following the human-in-the-loop concept. At the same time patients are supported by their health assistants to facilitate a healthier life, wellness and wellbeing