María Teresa Arredondo

A telehealth system for Parkinson's disease remote monitoring. The PERFORM approach

This paper summarizes the experience and the lessons learned from the European project PERFORM (A sophisticated multi-parametric system FOR the continuous effective assessment and monitoring of motor status in Parkinsons disease and other neurodegenerative diseases). PERFORM is aimed to provide a telehealth system for the remote monitoring of Parkinsons disease patients (PD) at their homes. This paper explains the global experience with PERFORM. It summarizes the technical performance of the system and the feedback received from the patients in terms of usability and wearability.

Neuro-fuzzy based glucose prediction model for patients with Type 1 diabetes mellitus

This paper presents the design, the development and the evaluation of a personalized glucose prediction model for patients with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM). The personalized model is based on neuro-fuzzy techniques in order to capture the metabolic behavior of a patient with T1DM. Moreover, wavelets are applied as activation functions in order to enhance the prediction performance and avoid local minimum during training stage. The model receives as input, data from sensors which record in real time glucose levels and physical activity, and provides with future glucose levels. The proposed model is evaluated using data from the medical records of 6 patients with T1DM for the time being on CGMSs and physical activity sensors. The obtained results demonstrate the ability of the proposed model to capture the metabolic behavior of a patient with T1DM and to handle intra- and inter-patient variability.

Feasibility of a wireless health monitoring system for prevention and health assessment of elderly people

The work presented in this paper comprises the methodology and results of a pilot study on the feasibility of a wireless health monitoring system designed under main EU challenges for the promotion of healthy and active ageing. The system is focused on health assessment, prevention and lifestyle promotion of elderly people. Over a hundred participants including elderly users and caregivers tested the system in four pilot sites across Europe. Tests covered several scenarios in senior centers and real home environments, including performance and usability assessment. Results indicated strong satisfactoriness on usability, usefulness and user friendliness, and the acceptable level of reliability obtained supports future investigation on the same direction for further improvement and transfer of conclusions to the real world in the healthcare delivery.

User interaction design and development of a heart failure management system based on wearable and information technologies.

In the Western World, cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading source of death. Only in Europe, they cause 45% of all deaths. Besides heart failure, the paradigm of CVD, affects mainly people older than 65. Facing this reality, the European Union has funded MyHeart Project, whose mission is empowering citizens to fight CVD by means of a preventive lifestyle and an early diagnosis. This paper presents the design and development of the user interaction for a heart failure management system. This system consists on wearable and mobile technologies which monitors the vital body signals in a daily basis, providing a continuous assessment of this chronic disease

Use of unsupervised neural networks for blood pressure profile classification

A methodology to classify blood pressure (BP) profiles with unsupervised learning neural networks is described. It can be used to discriminate different BP profile morphologies or hypertension levels (normotension, borderline, moderate and severe hypertension). After an extensive feasibility study, the Kohonens topology preserving maps were chosen to identify similar morphologies in 100 BP profiles from different subjects. Afterwards, obtained results were validated using another group of 142 BP profiles.<<ETX>>

Gamification system to support family-based behavioral interventions for childhood obesity

Childhood obesity is becoming one of the most serious public health problems both in health and economic terms. This paper introduces a technological solution, “OB CITY” that supports the management of childhood obesity. The system mainly uses the behavior treatment, providing two types of user terminal for the parents and the children, through an establishment of a childrens social network game, letting parents grow children with a scientific way, and letting children have good living habits and learn the relevant knowledge in the game, and get a normal value of BMI. The system is in a definition phase, and will be validated with user interaction experts, leading to a first mockup to be tested with end-users.

Guidelines for the economic analysis of a telematic platform for Parkinson's disease monitoring

PERFORM (A sophisticated multi-parametric system FOR the continuous effective assessment and monitoring of motor status in Parkinsons disease and other neurodegenerative diseases) is an European project which aim is to provide doctors with a telematic tool for the remote monitoring of Parkinsons disease (PD) patients at their homes. The technical performance of PERFORM has been addressed in previous publications. The aim of this work is to introduce the best well-known methodologies and indicators used in the health economics field, normally linked to the assessment of drugs or devices, and provide a set of guidelines for the use of these methodologies in the assessment of telehealth systems focused on PD patients. PD will also be introduced in economic terms, i.e. burden and cost of PD. This study will be done with special emphasis in European countries.

A methodology to assess human factors of ambulatory portable information systems

This paper describes a methodology to assess human factors of ambulatory portable systems, which has been applied to a particular system for the management of diabetic patients, developed in our laboratories (DIACRONO). It is based on automatic recording of any interaction (local time and event code) of the user with the portable systems and has been implemented by a set of built-in tools procedures installed on patient pocket computer units. Results are evaluated in their capability to objectively describe user behaviours patterns to induce formative or summative evaluation outcomes. The method developed provides a non-intrusive and concurrent description of the intemction between the patient and the hand-held unit, opening a new procedure to characterize the patient behaviour in a way untenable with any other methods. Other approaches such as questionnaires and self assessment to verify objective results were also included. The methodology developed can be used to analyze human factors suited to information systems for chronic patient self-care.

A simulator of therapies for education in diabetes

A novel procedure that runs on a PC-compatible and is designed to help the diabetic training of patients and physicians is reported. The interrelationship between the treatment selected and the diabetic patients behavior is simulated by a dynamic metabolic model that estimates blood glucose. It works on the information provided on diet, insulin sequence, and exercise regime. Different proposed training sessions can be arranged with the simulator.<<ETX>>

A model for integrating points of care testing into a distributed healthcare environment

Emerging Internet technologies are applied to create and manage a Virtual Laboratory Information System (VLIS), integrated into a distributed healthcare environment. The main objective of the system is to organise the transference of clinical testing from the traditional large central laboratories to a cooperative scheme of several manageable Points of Care Testing (POCTs). In other words, the goal of this model is to centralise just the relevant clinical data into each Hospital Information System (HIS), instead of concentrating the analyser instruments in outsized and expensive laboratories. The proposed solution is being developed and validated within the DLAB project - an international initiative partially funded by the European Commission and is described in this paper.