Near-Body Space Intelligence: Technical Architecture and Methodological Framework for Proactive Health

Abstract

Against the backdrop of population aging, traditional passive healthcare models face severe challenges, and proactive health has been evelated to a national strategy. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) supports remote monitoring, personalized treatment, and proactive intervention by interconnecting medical devices, sensors, and information systems. Although IoMT and artificial intelligence technologies are driving the transformation of healthcare services from passive response to proactive prevention, existing IoMT architectures lack systematic integration of near-body space sensing, edge intelligence, and personal health data sovereignty, and fragmented technical solutions cannot readily support large-scale implementation of proactive health. We propose the personal health passport (PHP) as a pivotal breakthrough, integrating sensing data and ensuring data sovereignty through a unified personal health digital infrastructure, driving a proactive health service ecosystem covering all-age, full-lifecycle, and omnipresent dimensions, and aligning the near-body space intelligence (NBSI) architecture with a broader proactive-health ecology that includes theoretical foundations, technical standards, infrastructure, products, service systems, and application demonstrations. This study proposes a "5+1"-layer full-stack technical architecture for NBSI oriented towards proactive health, encompassing six layers: spatial perception, intelligent equipment, data governance, edge intelligence, services, and financial assurance. With PHP as the core data carrier, it integrates key technologies such as wearable devices, edge computing, federated learning (FL), and blockchain, supporting multimodal data fusion and privacy-preserving computation. This architecture has been validated through field implementation in multiple scenarios, including medical-nursing integration institutions, urban community home-based elderly care, county-level rural-health integration, and community-level primary care. Four-scenario validation demonstrated the architecture’s cross-setting adaptability. The full-stack technical architecture proposed in this study provides a replicable technical framework for the large-scale implementation of proactive health. Through the PHP, it establishes data sovereignty and cross-scenario interoperability, supports real-time monitoring, predictive intervention, and personalized services, and advances the shift of healthcare services towards a data-driven proactive health paradigm.

Keywords

Aging-Technology Response (ATR) / proactive health for Aaging / three-scenario elderly care / near-body space intelligence / three elder populations / personal health passport / age-friendly environment

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The Author(s). Published by Higher Education Press.

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