Main description:

Europe is facing a paradox: while governments try to curb public spending, the demands on our healthcare systems continue to rise. The use of smart technologies and innovation can help to address the challenges faced by healthcare systems today, such as an ageing population, a shortage of healthcare professionals and restrictions on financial resources. But despite increasing evidence of the benefits technology can bring, the healthcare sector has been slow to embrace the digital revolution, and has stuck to more traditional methods and models. This book presents selected contributions to the symposium on Personal Health Monitoring (PHM) and Ethics and future areas of PHM, which took place in advance of the 11th World Congress of Bioethics, held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in June 2012. Most of the papers present the outcomes of the European PHM-Ethics project, which conducted interdisciplinary analyses of emerging PHM applications. Additional invited contributions deal with important issues related to the projectAEs primary objectives and outcomes.
The project is strongly associated with the new e-Health Action Plan, launched by the European Commission in December 2012, which is designed to bring the benefits of digital solutions into healthcare systems. The book covers a broad spectrum, ranging from the technical setup of PHM systems to ethical issues raised by PHM applications, and will be of interest to all those concerned with improving the provision of healthcare worldwide.