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Director's Message

Our Vision: Proactive Health Systems

Imagine the day when a personalized health care system woven into the fabric of our daily lives invisibly monitors and maintains our health. That day is coming soon. At the University of Rochester's Center for Future we're creating Proactive Health Care Systems — by combining technology and medicine in ways that enable individuals, family caregivers and professional health care providers to work together to maintain personal wellness.

At the Center for Future Health our focus is on empowering individuals in their own health care. We are asking how to best employ emerging technologies to create systems that effectively meet the challenges of staying well. We want to know what new systems are needed, and how to connect them effectively to our current health care system. Most of all, we want to engage you to collaborate with us in this fundamental societal change.

The Center for Future Health is home to energetic interdisciplinary teams of engineers and scientists, health care providers, social scientists, business professionals, and policymakers all working together to forge the new health care system paradigm. Our dream is to make Rochester, NY the model for this fresh approach to self-care for the nation.

Sample Research Projects include:

Developing computer based systems that support individual decision-making, and allow concise information sharing with health care providers when the user chooses.

Analyzing activity patterns at home for the early detection of symptoms of cognitive impairment thereby permitting early intervention.

Effective proactive health care systems will combine the latest developments in sensing technologies, ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction and information technology. The central challenge is to find the best ways to apply and to integrate the technologies to create useable and effective personal health care systems. To address this challenge, we have created the Smart Medical Home Research Lab and Medical Validation Service Concepts to assess the medical efficacy and usability of personal health care technologies and systems.

Our Advisory Board brings together the complementary talents of consumer groups, policymakers, industry leaders, charitable foundations, and health care experts, to make the vision of a proactive health system a reality within the next 10 years.

Join us now in the effort to make proactive health care systems a part of everyday life.

Alice Pentland, MD
Director, Center for Future Health