Dimosthenis Georgiadis

Ditis: A Collaborative Virtual Medical Team for Home Healthcare of Cancer Patients

Complex and chronic illnesses, such as cancer, demand the use of specialised treatment protocols, administered and monitored by a patient centric co-ordinated team of multidisciplinary healthcare professionals. Care of chronic illnesses (e.g. cancer patients) by a team of health care professionals at home is often necessary due to the protracted length of the illness, the differing medical conditions, as well as the different stages of the chronic illness. Most importantly home care can offer comfort for the patient and their family, in the familiar surrounding of their home, and at the same time being cost effective, as compared to the high cost of hospital beds. Hospital based treatment for chronic patients is limited, often demand based for short periods of time, used mainly for acute incidents. As it is not possible for the health care team to be physically present by the patient at all times, or at any time physically together, whilst the patient is undergoing treatment at home (or work), a principal aim is to overcome the difficulty of coordination and communication, through DITIS (ΔΙΤΗΣ, in Greek, stands for: Network for Medical Collaboration). DITIS is a system that supports dynamic Virtual Collaborative HealthCare Teams dealing with the home-healthcare. It supports the dynamic creation, management and co-ordination of virtual medical teams, for the continuous treatment of the patient at home, and if needed for periodic visits to places of specialised treatment and back home.

ICT Systems and Services for Ageing Well: Identification and Assessment of an Important Set (Package) of ICT Services for Active Ageing and Independent Living

Currently, the main care model for supporting elderly people living alone at home is based on informal and formal caregivers assistance. Considering the demographic changes of older population, which increases rapidly, this model is expected to pose major challenges both in the economy as well as the society. To address these challenges, there is growing attention for assistive technologies to support seniors stay active and independent, for as long as possible, in their preferred home environments. ICT systems for Ageing Well are among those initiatives. The work presented in this paper is based on the context of the Miraculous-Life project. It focuses on the identification and assessment, in terms of usefulness, technical feasibility and constrains, of a set (package) of services that an ICT system for Ageing Well should support. The results extracted from our study and provided in this paper can be considered by other projects working in the area of Ageing Well and assist the consortium to gain an insight about (i) which ICT services can provide the greater benefit to the elderly and their caregivers’ QoL, and thus reduce time and resources needed to be allocated for identifying, from scratch, the services that will be supported by their system, and (ii) the technical perspective of the ICT services and prioritize their development, as well as, facilitate better allocation of their resources, to minimize any risks that could result in failure to implement these services in the framework of their project.

An Intelligent Web-Based Healthcare System: The Case of DYMOS

Today’s information age is accelerating at quantum speed. Advances, such as the Internet and high-speed networks, have propelled the never-ending quest for information. In this regard, eHealth services is a continuously growing sector, driving the need for advances in the dynamic working environment of different medical actors promoting the effective collaboration within the given contextual and technological constraints. Henceforth, this chapter defines and classifies the various virtual communities in the eHealth sector, analyses existing related approaches and identifies current problems, stressing emphasis on the notion of workflow management within the multi/cross-organizational environment. It further proposes an eHealth system, DYMOS, which has been based on a suggested extended collaboration model, with features that tend to tackle the identified weaknesses. Finally, it presents a positive evaluation of the system’s efficiency and effectiveness with the implementation of an experimentation phase which has used trials in a real hospital environment.

A Robotic Cloud Ecosystem for Elderly Care and Ageing Well: The GrowMeUp Approach

Robotic systems in Ageing Well, like GrowMeUp, are among those assistive technologies, providing companionship and offering functionality related to the support of active and independent living, monitoring and maintaining safety, and enhancement of health and psychological well-being of the elderly. The work presented in this paper is based on the context of GrowMeUp project and focuses on presenting the main novelties introduced with the GrowMeUp system, providing a robotic cloud ecosystem, able to support, encourage and engage the older persons to stay socially involved and longer active and independent, in carrying out their daily life at home. Emphasis is given on the important issues of end user’s acceptance, usability and affordability and how technologies like cloud computing and different learning and intelligent dialoguing mechanisms are brought together in one solution to address these issues.

Evaluation Metrics for eHealth Services and Applications within Smart Houses Context

eHealth services is a continuously growing sector, driving the need for advances in both the network characteristics and infrastructure, as well as in the available mobile devices used. The same need requires the development of quality software applications to facilitate and service eHealth activities. On these grounds, this paper proposes a novel evaluation methodology that takes into consideration the peculiarities of sensor/actuator related services. It further focuses on aspects of software quality for eHealth services and applications, and identifies a set of quality characteristics and attributes to take into consideration. These quality characteristics are integrated into our proposed evaluation methodology during the analysis and engineering phases, which is a revised version of the spiral software process used in web engineering. The efficacy of the proposed approach in a real scenario is discussed.