**1. Introduction**

*"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it [1]".*

Our time is marked by cheap sensors and fast and powerful processors. These elements have the power to cause profound changes in our society and unleash great opportunities, which lead us to the Ubiquitous Computing field. Mark Weiser defined Ubiquitous Computing as computation (not necessarily computers) everywhere and everything. Although, at the moment, Weiser considers that computers were still "in a world of its own [1]", he already envisioned a new threshold, when the technological advances of computing would overcome the computer to install itself in the most common objects of the daily life [1, 2]. In this sense, it is noteworthy to mention the Internet of Things (IoT) technology as an important element of the Ubiquitous Computing reality.

During the last decades, we could observe the phenomenon of computation needing less hardware, becoming more portable and migrating to our offices, pockets, clothing, and finally, to our body [3]. This spreading process brings in-depth transformations to all human activities and healthcare, and all its dimensions are being strongly impacted. Throughout the world, the healthcare systems, including governments and private companies, are facing challenges to keep the financial

balance. Regarding this issue, there are two causes I would like to highlight: Population aging and the lack of adherence to health treatments [4].

## **1.1 Population aging**

We can easily observe a fast change in the demographic profile of the world population. The drop of mortality added to the increase in birth rates in the 40's and 50's resulted in a rise of people aged 60 and older [5]. The phenomenon of the population aging can be observed in all the countries, even in regions with low- and middle-income [5]. These rapid and profound changes in the age pyramid also means transformations in various aspects of society, including family dynamics, social security and healthcare demands. Therefore, it is possible to affirm that society is experiencing "a longevity revolution" [5].

The longevity revolution is a gift to our generation and future ones. But, for enjoying all the benefits of this gift, is essential that society is prepared to offer to individuals a healthy and active aging process, allowing people to keep independence and quality of life as long as possible. Thereby, in order to elaborate appropriate plans to achieve such an important and challenging goal, it is crucial to understand the size and speed of the aging process in society. **Figure 1** highlights that the percentage of persons aged 65 years and older increased from 6 per cent in 1990 to 9 per cent in 2019. According to United Nations projections, this estimate is expected to reach 16 per cent by 2050. Additionally, life expectancy at birth reached 72.3 years [6].

Another interesting data from the United Nations report is the number of persons aged 80 years or older. In **Figure 2**, we can observe that this age group raised from 54 million in 1990 to 143 million in 2019. Moreover, the estimates indicate they will be 426 million by 2050 [6]. Therefore, we can expect the costs of healthcare to increase, owing to the strong correlation between population aging and healthcare expenditure, being this impact on health finances largely propelled by the prevalence of chronic conditions in elderly population [7, 8].

**Figure 1.** *Percentage of persons aged 65 years or over from 1990 to 2050.*

*The Role of Ubiquitous Computing in the Transformation of the Healthcare System DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98303*

**Figure 2.** *Number (in millions) of persons aged 80 years or over from 1990 to 2050.*

#### **1.2 Adherence to health treatments**

To start the discussion, it is pivotal to understand the meaning of adherence to health care practices. The term suffered an evolution, abandoning the simple idea of adherence to medication or even "the extent to which the patient follows medical instructions" [9] to include a wider range of individual behaviors. According to World Health Organization (WHO), the active search for treatment, immunization, self-management of risk habits and several other actions can be included in the list of indicators of adherence to healthy habits [9].

In fact, adherence is a very complex and multifaceted term, involving a diverse range of actions, behaviors and habits of the individuals. Thus, the task of finding an appropriate and complete definition for adherence already proves to be challenging, evidencing the possible difficulties to choose the most suitable indicators to measure it.

Despite these concerns and the risk of incurring in results with a certain degree of inaccuracy, it is important to understand the adherence and how to improve the levels of commitment and engagement of the patients, since a low adherence has negative impacts on the effectiveness and cost of health treatments [10].

Most of the attempts to measure adherence rely on patients' reports, which tend to be incomplete and subjective, especially when the patient is non-adherent [10]. However, the recent technological advances give us the unique opportunity to develop extremely precise tools to evaluate how much the behaviors of the individuals draw near the healthcare professional recommendations and, finally, to elaborate strategies based on reality.

Thus, it is possible to realize the association between the transformation of healthcare demands and the possibilities of ubiquitous computing in promoting the transformation of healthcare paradigms. The emerging technologies that compose this new ongoing reality, known as ubiquitous computing, have the potential to cause great revolutions not only for patients, but mainly for managers and for the society that finances the health system.
