Nutrition and Metabolism
Smart Health Research Group
Location
Tarragona
Team members
Team leader
Antoni Martínez-BallestéAgustí Solanas
Misions
The adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) within the healthcare sector led to the concept of electronic health (e-Health), which contributed to the reduction of costs and the increase of efficiency. Following the consolidation of e-Health, the generalised use of mobile devices with self-localisation and communication capabilities (e.g. smartphones) opens the door to a new concept of health - mobile health (m-Health), which can be understood as the delivery of healthcare services via mobile communication devices. Moreover, ICT are used by local and regional governments to foster the deployment of the so-called Smart Cities. m-Health has an extraordinary potential since it adds to the advantages of e-Health all the benefits related to the ubiquity of mobile devices (i.e. global monitoring capabilities, wide availability, immediacy).
Due to the fact that m-Health and Smart Cities are studied independently and deserve attention by their own right, they have rarely converged into common points of contact. However, we claim that the infrastructure and technologies of smart cities could be leveraged and mixed with the concepts of m-Health and telemedicine to create a novel and much more powerful ubiquitous concept: Smart Health (s-Health).
