Perspectives on High Technologies for Low-Cost Healthcare

This article discusses some of the unique demographic and epidemiological changes that China faces. As China is still a developing country, most of its people cannot afford expensive healthcare solutions. Especially in the poor rural areas, healthcare service is a luxury for some people. Therefore, this article summarizes several key strategies to reduce medical expenditures at the national level and proposes to develop a new information system in the form of a personal, home, community, and hospital (PHCH) four-layered architecture. Using the management of blood pressure (BP) as an example, we have shown that innovative technologies in wearable medical devices and body area networks (BANs) can be developed to collect information for this new system to overcome geographic and financial constraints and to provide a low-cost and effective solution to manage chronic health problems.