Putting the Patient at the Centre: Making Telemedicine Services Personal Again

In aging societies, healthcare innovations are becoming increasingly important. ICT is a key factor in many of these innovations, as it possesses great potential for increasing efficiency in the healthcare domain. We stress the importance of both attention for the complete patient health status, and framework adoption for telemedicine applications. This is achieved through the adoption of a holistic health model such as the ICF (International Classification of Functioning, Health and Disabilities) and the provision of care support wherever and whenever possible to assist patients in their social context. In the U-Care project, which we describe as our use case, we adopt these ideas. In this paper, we elaborate a holistic view on telemedicine application design, involving the context of the end-users, to develop evolvable and tailorable care services.