ABSTRACT
Health care delivery efforts have evolved over the years to reflect the available technology, medication, approaches to treatment and global economic realities. Medical diagnostics is a platform upon which many other sectors of healthcare delivery are built and its level of development dictates the level of development in the other sectors as well. A fundamental aspect of medical diagnostics is the acquisition of information upon which a clinical decision can be based on (Splinter, 2010). The overarching theme of the twenty-first century healthcare delivery evolution has been the paradigm shift from curative to preventive medicine and from a doctor-centered approach to a patientcentered one. This paradigm shift allowed diagnostic medicine to assume an even greater level of importance and is responsible for the growing trend of Personalized Health Monitoring (PHM). Health monitoring refers to a systematic approach for keeping track of the health status of any given entity. It can refer to both animate and inanimate objects. For example, the process of monitoring the degradation of infrastructure like bridges and buildings falls under this category, as does the process of monitoring the health of a human being. In this chapter, our definition of PHM refers to the process of monitoring the vital and nonvital health signals of a human being. PHM is useful for monitoring signals that change over time. It is not suited to readings that rarely change or those that do not change, like a patient’s genotype.
