Personal Mobile Health Systems for Supporting Patients with Chronic Diseases

Personal Health Systems (PHSs) are systems that offer tools to support changes in the behavior of users, such as changes in medication schedule, diets, exercise, etc. These PHSs may be based on fixed or mobile devices. When a PHS is based on mobile devices, it may be considered as part of a mobile health (mHealth) technology. In this paper we define a PHS based on mobile technology as a Personal Mobile Health Systems (PMHS) and propose three PMHS classifications: Education, Information and Monitoring. These scenarios use different wireless communication technologies, such as Bluetooth, WSN, Wi-Fi, GSM and 3G. The proposed PMHS is aimed at individuals suffering from chronic illness such as diabetes, obesity and/or cardiovascular disease and are intended to be used as a tool to help patients with the treatment of their disease.