Personal Healthcare System Based-on Mobile Platform

With the improvement of life quality, health care is beginning to play an increasingly important role in people’s lives. Increasing number of medical institutions are using information systems to improve their quality and efficiency of medical services and business processes. In recent years, it is well known that chronic diseases have become the leading cause of death and the incidence of chronic diseases continue to increase as we age. Cardio-vascular, neurologic and disorders are predicted to become the top three causes of mortality in future and the cost of chronic diseases are predicted to grow substantially. Impact of the increasing epidemic of chronic disease on health care and costs provides an incentive to find more compelling ways to care for these patients.In modern society, mobile phone is commonly used, ranging from the young college students to various people in modern office buildings and family houses. Consequently, it can be seen that the mobile phone provides a potential opportunity to influence a wider sphere than the computer. Fast growing of information technology, dramatic rise of mobile phones, as well as the significant reduce price of monitoring devices provides essential conditions and seamless access for health monitoring anytime and anywhere. Mobile health aims to combine mobile computing, medical sensor, and communications technologies to healthcare for more convenient and effective health services.In this article, we examine the role that mobile computing technologies play in the mobile health field. Our objective is to convince readers that dramatic developments in mobile computing technologies in recent years will propel the development of mobile health field to the next level, and will help the adoption of related technologies. As a first step we are going to present the background of mobile health. After that, we will present a general framework of mobile health systems, and we will mainly describe the role played by mobile phone in the whole system. Finally, we present DiabetesCarer, a mobile health toolkit that aims to help diabetics by effectively monitor patients’conditions, manage their home health procedure and adopt more healthy behaviors.