Provenance-aware Pervasive Computing in Clinical Applications

Pervasive computing applications bring together heterogeneous network-connected devices, services and resources to enable context-aware information integration. The increasing adoption of pervasive computing technology in the healthcare domain offers a healthcare model that delivers high quality service with fewer resources. In this paper, we briefly review the existing pervasive healthcare solutions and propose a novel provenance-aware system design that can enhance the performance of such solutions by means of including provenance capture functionality. We argue that our system architecture can improve quality of clinical data, efficiency of its collection, and its integrating ability with other data sources. To demonstrate our system and explain its provenance capacity, we use a clinical research example in which a patient's condition is closely monitored in order to assess the safety and efficacy of medications and treatments prescribed to him.