Ubiquitous Healthcare Profile Management Applying Smart Card Technology Maria-Anna Fengou, Georgios Mantas, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos and Nikos Komninos Wire Communications Laboratory, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Patras University Campus, 265 04 Rio Patras, Greece afengoum@upatras.gr, gman@upatras.gr, dlympero@upatras.gr, nkom@ieee.org Abstract. Nowadays, the patient-centric healthcare approach is focused on ubiquitous healthcare services. Furthermore, the adoption of cloud computing technology leads to more efficient ubiquitous healthcare systems. Moreover, the personalization of the delivery of ubiquitous healthcare services is enabled with the introduction of user profiles. In this paper, we propose five generic healthcare profile structures corresponding to the main categories of the participating entities included in a typical ubiquitous healthcare system in a cloud computing environment. In addition, we propose a profile management system incorporating smart card technology to increase its efficiency and the quality of the provided services of the ubiquitous healthcare system. Keywords: cloud computing, user profiles, profile management, smart card. 1 Introduction Nowadays, the patient-centric healthcare approach is focused on healthcare services related to effective treatment, disease prevention, proactive actions and life quality improvement at the right time, right place and right manner without limitations on time and location. Essentially, the patient-centric approach can be materialized through ubiquitous healthcare. Furthermore, the current trend of outsourcing of IT infrastructure via adoption of cloud computing technology leads to more efficient ubiquitous healthcare systems in which end-user data are stored and processed at many different places distributed geographically [1]. However, many ubiquitous healthcare services built by third-party providers are usually tied to specific scopes and they are not able to be adapted to the unique preferences and interest of the endusers. Because of these limitations, personalized healthcare systems based on user profiles have been recently deployed [2]. Profile management materializes the main functionality of personalized healthcare systems [3]. In addition, profile management integrates the user profiling process consisting of three main steps. In the first step, an information collection process takes place in order raw information related to the user to be gathered. The second phase includes the user profile construction process based on the gathered user information. Finally, in the third phase, a service makes use of the data in the user profile in order to provide personalized services [4]. During the past few years, a lot of effort has been invested in user profile management systems for ubiquitous healthcare systems. However, these profile management systems incorporate user profiles including limited user information associated with user preferences and interests. Therefore, it is essential the creation of more enriched user profiles for efficient ubiquitous healthcare systems. Furthermore, taking into consideration the challenges that a ubiquitous healthcare