Health Care

Many health care systems are cyber-physical systems. In hospitals, for example, information from many sources like bedside monitors, lab results, and practitioner observations are combined to inform interventations. Today, many components of the health system operate in isolation and some limited integrated solutions are available. In the future, they will be combined into networked closed-loop systems with humans in the loop to improve medical workflows and patient safety. Emerging technologies aimed at enabling remote care of patients will provide care practitioners with informtion on how activities of daily living affect healthcare and allow practitioners to make more informed decisions about interventions. The combination of these two currently seperate aspects of healthcare would transform the healthcare system into one large and complex and safety-critical cyber-physical system with many advantages as well as challenges.