Technology-Based Innovations to Foster Personalized Healthy Lifestyles and Well-Being: A Targeted Review

BACKGROUND: New community-based arrangements and novel technologies can empower individuals to be active participants in their health maintenance, enabling people to control and self-regulate their health and wellness and make better health- and lifestyle-related decisions. Mobile sensing technology and health systems responsive to individual profiles combined with cloud computing can expand innovation for new types of interoperable services that are consumer-oriented and community-based. This could fuel a paradigm shift in the way health care can be, or should be, provided and received, while lessening the burden on exhausted health and social care systems. OBJECTIVE: Our goal is to identify and discuss the main scientific and engineering challenges that need to be successfully addressed in delivering state-of-the-art, ubiquitous eHealth and mHealth services, including citizen-centered wellness management services, and reposition their role and potential within a broader context of diverse sociotechnical drivers, agents, and stakeholders. METHODS: We review the state-of-the-art relevant to the development and implementation of eHealth and mHealth services in critical domains. We identify and discuss scientific, engineering, and implementation-related challenges that need to be overcome to move research, development, and the market forward. RESULTS: Several important advances have been identified in the fields of systems for personalized health monitoring, such as smartphone platforms and intelligent ubiquitous services. Sensors embedded in smartphones and clothes are making the unobtrusive recognition of physical activity, behavior, and lifestyle possible, and thus the deployment of platforms for health assistance and citizen empowerment. Similarly, significant advances are observed in the domain of infrastructure supporting services. Still, many technical problems remain to be solved, combined with no less challenging issues related to security, privacy, trust, and organizational dynamics. CONCLUSIONS: Delivering innovative ubiquitous eHealth and mHealth services, including citizen-centered wellness and lifestyle management services, goes well beyond the development of technical solutions. For the large-scale information and communication technology-supported adoption of healthier lifestyles to take place, crucial innovations are needed in the process of making and deploying usable empowering end-user services that are trusted and user-acceptable. Such innovations require multidomain, multilevel, transdisciplinary work, grounded in theory but driven by citizens’ and health care professionals’ needs, expectations, and capabilities and matched by business ability to bring innovation to the market.