Patient centred health data acquisition using mobile phones

The availability of mobile information and communication technologies is increasing rapidly and provides huge opportunities for home monitoring applications in particular for outpatients and patients suffering from chronic diseases. Because of the high availability of mobile phones these devices could be used as the home monitoring terminal (HMT) of choise to provide a basis for interaction between patients and caregivers. The most challenging part still is the patient terminal, i.e. to provide the user with a method to enter the measured data into the system. The objective of this paper is to present and compare solutions for mobile phone based HMT using textual input via numeric keypads as well as to present a unique approach to the human computer interface challenge which is based on digital camera enabled mobile phones and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).