%0 Journal Article
%T Development of Personal Wellness Information Model for Pervasive Healthcare
%A Antto Sepp£¿l£¿
%A Pirkko Nyk£¿nen
%A Pekka Ruotsalainen
%J Journal of Computer Networks and Communications
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/596749
%X Pervasive healthcare and citizen-centered care paradigm are moving the healthcare outside the hospital environment. Healthcare delivery is becoming more personalized and decentralized, focusing on prevention and proactive services with a complete view of health and wellbeing. The concept of wellness has been used to describe this holistic view of health, which focuses on physical, social, and mental well-being. Pervasive computing makes it possible to collect information and offer services anytime and anywhere. To support pervasive healthcare with wellness approaches, semantic interoperability is needed between all actors and information sources in the ecosystem. This study focuses on the domain of personal wellness and analyzes related concepts, relationships, and environments. As a result of this study, we have created an information model that focuses on the citizens¡¯ perspectives and conceptualizations of personal wellness. The model has been created based on empirical research conducted with focus groups. 1. Introduction Healthcare delivery is undergoing a notable shift toward personalized services with distributed care processes that emphasize a more holistic view of health and wellness within a citizen-centered care model [1¨C6]. The new citizen-centered care paradigm focuses on the health, functioning, and well-being of people as a whole [7]. The focus, then, is more on preventive, proactive services with the citizen at the core of his/her care, instead of just treating diseases and symptoms [1, 2, 4¨C6]. In the future, it will not be enough to just access medical histories or test results, but citizens¡¯ lifestyle information, behavioral choices, and monitoring and measurement data will need to be considered to ensure preventive, proactive service [2, 4¨C6]. Such a view of health is not entirely new. The World Health Organization (WHO) defined health as early as 1948 as ¡°a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease of infirmity¡± [8, page 100]. This definition acknowledged a holistic view of health and supported a focus beyond disease treatment. Despite this WHO¡¯s definition, the concept of health may cause misunderstandings because usually it is understood to refer to a person¡¯s state when free of diseases, and the focus is on medical well-being. However, health can be defined in many ways, for example, it can be seen as a state of stable physiological function, lack of diseases, and absence of illnesses. One term that has been used to describe more complete health and well-being of people is
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jcnc/2012/596749/