Cecilia Vera-Muñoz

A system to promote self-behaviors of patients with coronary heart disease

Personalized health devices are the novel paradigm to reduce healthcare costs and to improve the quality of health services. At the same time, health interventions and promotion of self behaviors generate benefits to healthcare and allow citizens to be more involved in their own health management. This paper describes the process followed in HeartCycle project to design education and coaching services to promote self-behaviors in a closed loop monitoring system for patients with coronary heart diseases that suffered a myocardial infarction.

Design Framework for Ambient Assisted Living Platforms

Nowadays the new technological advances offer the possibility to provide a great number of different personalized services that cover the needs of diverse categories of users. The application of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm and the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) concept makes possible the creation of new applications that can significantly improve the quality of life of elderly and dependant people. This paper presents an interaction framework that provides a new generation of user interfaces for AAL services in the context of an AmI-based platform. This solution aims to develop the technological context where elderly and dependant citizens can increase their life independence.

A WEARABLE EMG MONITORING SYSTEM FOR EMOTIONS ASSESSMENT

The automatic detection and study of human emotions has always been an area of interest within the scientific community. The AUBADE European Union funded project has addressed this problem by developing an innovative, intelligent, multi-sensor and wearable system for the assessment of the emotional state of humans under special conditions (i.e. neurological diseases, stress, etc.). The system recognizes the emotions after processing biomedical signals (electromyogram, electrocardiogram, respiration rate and galvanic skin response) and can be applied in diverse areas. Currently, a health care sector scenario has been considered and validated, primarily in the neurology and psychology areas, in order to contribute to get precise diagnosis and treatment procedures for patients.

Clinical validation of a wearable system for emotional recognition based on biosignals.

Summary The AUBADE system can be trained to classify a subjects feelings into six different emotional classes, derived from three of the basic emotions (happiness, disgust and fear). The performance of different classifiers was examined. Biosignals were recorded from 24 healthy subjects who viewed pictures designed to invoke different emotional responses. A psychologist evaluated the emotional status of the subjects by looking at their faces. During the training stage, information from 15 subjects was used to teach the system how to discriminate the emotional status of the subject based on the biosignals provided as input. A subset of the data was used for comparing the performance of four different classifiers. They were evaluated using three different metrics: sensitivity, positive predictive accuracy and accuracy. Using the SVM classifier, the AUBADE system provided sensitivities in the range 63–81%. The positive predictive accuracy was in the range 71–95%. The accuracy was in the range 63–83%, depending on the emotional class considered. The work paves the way for remote telemonitoring of patients suffering from neurological diseases.

State of the Art on Games for Health Focus on Parkinson’s Disease Rehabilitation

This paper explores current trends and available solutions in the field of games for health focus on Parkinson’s disease (PD). According to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation it is estimated that seven to ten million people worldwide are living with PD. Besides this statistics tend to get worse as the population gets older and older. In the last decades the active ageing term has gained extreme importance. As the ageing of the population growths the healthcare policies and strategies need to adapt to this new situation. In that sense, active ageing aims to extend healthy life expectancy and quality of life for all people as they age. Games for health have been proved to be an excellent approach to maintain autonomy and independence for the older people.

A platform for the development of patient applications in the domain of personalized health

Personalized health (p-health) systems can contribute significantly to the sustainability of healthcare systems, though their feasibility is yet to be proven. One of the problems related to their development is the lack of well-established development tools for this domain. As the p-health paradigm is focused on patient self-management, big challenges arise around the design and implementation of patient systems. This paper presents a reference platform created for the development of these applications, and shows the advantages of its adoption in a complex project dealing with cardio-vascular diseases.

Results of the usability and acceptance evaluation of a cardiac rehabilitation system

Cardiac rehabilitation programs are extremely important during the recovery phase of patients who suffered a Myocardial Infarction (MI). Traditionally, these programs aimed at recovering the cardiovascular functioning by means of tailored exercise programs. However, during the last years, researchers and practitioners have started to consider a multi disciplinary approach for the interventions, where patient education and health behaviors changes play a central role both in rehabilitation and in secondary prevention. Nevertheless, the lack of resources and the need to have health professionals continuously involved in the patient supervision process, does not make possible to extend rehabilitation programs to all potential patients in the health care system. This paper presents the results of the usability and acceptance validation of a personalized home based cardiac rehabilitation system developed under the framework of HeartCycle, a project partially funded by the European Commission.

Innovative self management system for guided cardiac rehabilitation

This paper describes the design and development of a system for cardio rehabilitation of patients that suffered a myocardial infarction. The proposed solution focuses on exercise prescriptions and the encouragement of healthy behaviors. The innovative strategy of the design takes into account health promotion models to provide safe, assistive exercise training sessions, personalized feedbacks, and educational contents.

User interface framework for ambient intelligence platforms

Nowadays, the new technological advances make possible to offer different services in a complete personalized way, covering the needs of heterogeneous user groups. In the case of elderly users, the acceptance of technology is a key aspect in their motivation to use certain services, and in consequence, the adaptability of the user interfaces is a critical requirement to achieve this goal. This paper presents the intelligent and adaptive user interfaces of a system devoted to offer AAL services, especially designed for increasing elderly userss acceptance, and developed as part of AmIVital project innovative technological platform.

Adaptative User Interfaces to Promote Independent Ageing

During the last years, the EU population is experiencing an increasing aging process. This tendency is motivating the emergence of new needs and the appearance of diverse services and applications oriented improve the quality of life of senior citizens. The creation of such services requires the use of technological advances and design techniques specifically focused on addressing elderly requirements. This paper presents the adaptative user interfaces that have been developed in the context of an EU funded project, PERSONA, aiming to provide different services to promote independent aging.