Healthinfo Engineering

Abstract

Driven by the commission to proliferate information and communication technologies to health services globally, a new multidisciplinary direction is born, which can be named as Health Information (termed as a new word, Healthinfo) Engineering. To highlight the significances of Healthinfo Engineering, the evidence-based mHealth study in the WE-CARE project demonstrates technology perspectives. In this project, the authors built up a WE-CARE system, which integrate various necessary information and communication technologies to fulfill online healthcare services, even including advances from related math/modelling, physics sciences, etc. Without any doubt, such a system is a promising tool to change healthcare delivery. But this project also reveals there are many explicit and implicit factors left when using system-level integration in order to perform healthinfo applications. In general, in contrast to an explicit factor, an implicit factor is hidden from practical applications, which is the critical risk that may break down a healthinfo system. This phenomenon motivates us to investigate what's real bottlenecks in healthinfo systems. Based on the motivation, this paper summarizes healthinfo challenges from evidence study in the WE-CARE project, for instance, scheduling strategy, system light-loading, virtual clinical perception, privacy protection, etc. This technology summary shows that more extensive attention should be needed for healthinfo study not only in mobile and medical areas, and also in computer science, maths, physics, even including ethic, law, etc. In return, the new interdisciplinary cutting-edge science, Healthinfo Engineering, can make contributions to offer a practical life-cycle health management for all human being, including cancer supportive care.