Clinical Proof-of-Concept – A Evaluation Method for Pervasive Healthcare Systems

Pervasive Healthcare – i.e. designing pervasive computing technologies for healthcare usage – is an especially promising area within pervasive and ubiquitous computing research. However, it is extremely difficult to evaluate such systems because establishing clinical evidence for medical benefits would require longitudinal, randomized, doubleblind, placebo-controlled trials involving a homogeneous patient population and medical condition. This would not only require huge resources in terms of clinical staff and patient participation, but would also require the technology to be fully developed and ready for large scale use. The latter is simply not feasible when doing technological research into new types of pervasive healthcare technologies. In this paper, I suggest the method of ‘Clinical Proof-of-Concept’ as a method for evaluating pervasive healthcare technologies in order to establish the clinical feasibility of the technology before entering large-scale clinical trials. The method has been applied in a couple of cases and I report on lessons learned from this.