360 Quantified Self

Wearable devices with a wide range of sensors have contributed to the rise of the Quantified Self movement, where individuals log everything ranging from the number of steps they have taken, to their heart rate, to their sleeping patterns. Sensors do not, however, typically sense the social and ambient environment of the users, such as general life style attributes or information about their social network. This means that the users themselves, and the medical practitioners, privy to the wearable sensor data, only have a narrow view of the individual, limited mainly to certain aspects of their physical condition. In this paper we describe a number of use cases for how social media can be used to complement the check-up data and those from sensors to gain a more holistic view on individuals' health, a perspective we call the 360 Quantified Self. Health-related information can be obtained from sources as diverse as food photo sharing, location check-ins, or profile pictures. Additionally, information from a person's ego network can shed light on the social dimension of wellbeing which is widely acknowledged to be of utmost importance, even though they are currently rarely used for medical diagnosis. We articulate a long-term vision describing the desirable list of technical advances and variety of data to achieve an integrated system encompassing Electronic Health Records (EHR), data from wearable devices, alongside information derived from social media data.Comment: QCRI Technical Repor

Visions and Challenges in Managing and Preserving Data to Measure Quality of Life

Health-related data analysis plays an important role in self-knowledge, disease prevention, diagnosis, and quality of life assessment. With the advent of data-driven solutions, a myriad of apps and Internet of Things (IoT) devices (wearables, home-medical sensors, etc) facilitates data collection and provide cloud storage with a central administration. More recently, blockchain and other distributed ledgers became available as alternative storage options based on decentralised organisation systems. We bring attention to the human data bleeding problem and argue that neither centralised nor decentralised system organisations are a magic bullet for data-driven innovation if individual, community and societal values are ignored. The motivation for this position paper is to elaborate on strategies to protect privacy as well as to encourage data sharing and support open data without requiring a complex access protocol for researchers. Our main contribution is to outline the design of a self-regulated Open Health Archive (OHA) system with focus on quality of life (QoL) data.Comment: DSS 2018: Data-Driven Self-Regulating System

Performance assessment of a closed-loop system for diabetes management

Telemedicine systems can play an important role in the management of diabetes, a chronic condition that is increasing worldwide. Evaluations on the consistency of information across these systems and on their performance in a real situation are still missing. This paper presents a remote monitoring system for diabetes management based on physiological sensors, mobile technologies and patient/ doctor applications over a service-oriented architecture that has been evaluated in an international trial (83,905 operation records). The proposed system integrates three types of running environments and data engines in a single serviceoriented architecture. This feature is used to assess key performance indicators comparing them with other type of architectures. Data sustainability across the applications has been evaluated showing better outcomes for full integrated sensors. At the same time, runtime performance of clients has been assessed spotting no differences regarding the operative environmentThe authors wish to acknowledge the consortium of the METABO project (funded by the European Commission, Grant nr. 216270) for their commitment during concept development and trial execution.Martínez Millana, A.; Fico, G.; Fernández Llatas, C.; Traver Salcedo, V. (2015). Performance assessment of a closed-loop system for diabetes management. Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing. 53(12):1295-1303. doi:10.1007/s11517-015-1245-3S129513035312Bellazzi R, Larizza C, Montani A et al (2002) A telemedicine support dor diabetes management: the T-IDDM project. Comput Methods Programs Biomed 69:147–161Boloor K, Chirkova R, Salo T, Viniotis Y (2011) Analysis of response time percentile service level agreements in soa-based applications. 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J Diabetes Sci Technol 1(5):730–737Ma C et al (2006) Empowering patients with essential information and communication support in the context of diabetes. Int J Med Inform 75(8):577–596Müller AJ, Knuth M, Nikolaus KS, Krivánek R, Küster F, Hasslacher C (2013) First clinical evaluation of a new percutaneous optical fiber glucose sensor for continuous glucose monitoring in diabetes. J Diabetes Sci Technol 7:13Nundy S et al (2012) Using mobile health to support chronic care model: developing an institutional model. Int J Telemed Appl 2012, Art Id 871925. doi: 10.1155/2012/871925Obstfelder A, Engeseth KH, Wynn R (2007) Characteristic of succesfully implemented telemedical applications. Implement Sci 2:25Pravin P et al (2012) A framework for the comparison of mobile patient monitoring systems. 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mHealth: monitoring platform for diabetes patients

Diabetes is a metabolic disease that can be explained by the high level of glucose in the blood. Constant monitoring of patients with this type of disease is crucial to the success of their treatment due to the high number of factors that condition it, such as nutrition, exercise and insulin production. This research consists of a software development project based on mHealth practice, which aims to cover all the needs of patients and health professionals, introducing improvements in the prevention, diagnosis and control of endocrine pathology, as well as improvements in hospital management. The web platform should be able to send a warning to the healthcare professional in cases where a patient's recorded level exceeds normal values and contain all the patient's records. The aim is to provide support to treatment, monitoring and data collection based on IoT principles, where medical devices allow communication between machines and interaction between them, sharing and managing data. The healthcare professional will have the necessary information to assess the health status of his patient and, if necessary, make some changes to improve the patient's daily routines.This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020

CoachAI: A Conversational Agent Assisted Health Coaching Platform

Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health intervention delivery to individuals and groups. CoachAI instantiates a text based healthcare chatbot system that bridges the remote human coach and the users. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive healthcare and healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver tasks; and (3) it presents a domain independent mobile health conversational agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and analyze the results of a one month validation study on physical activity, healthy diet and stress management

PREDIRCAM eHealth platform for individualized telemedical assistance for lifestyle modification in the treatment of obesity, diabetes, and cardiometabolic risk prevention: a pilot study (PREDIRCAM 1)

Background: Healthy diet and regular physical activity are powerful tools in reducing diabetes and cardiometabolic risk. Various international scientific and health organizations have advocated the use of new technologies to solve these problems. The PREDIRCAM project explores the contribution that a technological system could offer for the continuous monitoring of lifestyle habits and individualized treatment of obesity as well as cardiometabolic risk prevention. Methods: PREDIRCAM is a technological platform for patients and professionals designed to improve the effectiveness of lifestyle behavior modifications through the intensive use of the latest information and communication technologies. The platform consists of a web-based application providing communication interface with monitoring devices of physiological variables, application for monitoring dietary intake, ad hoc electronic medical records, different communication channels, and an intelligent notification system. A 2-week feasibility study was conducted in 15 volunteers to assess the viability of the platform. Results: The website received 244 visits (average time/session: 17 min 45 s). A total of 435 dietary intakes were recorded (average time for each intake registration, 4 min 42 s ± 2 min 30 s), 59 exercises were recorded in 20 heart rate monitor downloads, 43 topics were discussed through a forum, and 11 of the 15 volunteers expressed a favorable opinion toward the platform. Food intake recording was reported as the most laborious task. Ten of the volunteers considered long-term use of the platform to be feasible. Conclusions: The PREDIRCAM platform is technically ready for clinical evaluation. Training is required to use the platform and, in particular, for registration of dietary food intake

Promoting Health for Chronic Conditions: a Novel Approach that integrates Clinical and Personal Decision Support

Direct and indirect economic costs related to chronic diseases are increasing in Europe due to the aging of population. One of the most challenging goals is to improve the quality of life of patients affected by chronic conditions, and enhance their self-management. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture of a scalable solution, based on mobile tools, aimed to keep patients with chronic diseases away from acute episodes, to improve their quality of life and, consequently, to reduce their economic impact. Our solution aims to provide patients with a personalized tool for improving self-management, and it supports both patients and clinicians in decision-making through the implementation of two different Decision Support Systems. Moreover, the proposed architecture takes into account the interoperability and, particularly, the compliance with data transfer protocols (e.g., BT4/LE, ANT+, ISO/IEEE 11073) to ensure integration with existing devices, and with the semantic web approaches and standards related to the content and structure of the information (e.g., HL7, ICD-10 and openEHR) to ensure correct sharing of information with hospital information systems, and classification of patient behaviors (Coelition). The solution will be implemented and validated in future study

Medical data analysis based on Nao robot: An automated approach towards robotic real-time interaction with human body

There is a significant increase of strokes, heart diseases and premature death, people need more than ever to be aware of their vital signs such as blood pressure, heart beats, cholesterol level etc. Monitoring and analysing this medical data can help increase the awareness of the risk factor of heart disease. However, there is a huge pressure on medical staff and general practitioners (GPs), therefore this research proposes a medical data analysis based on Nao robots to meet these needs and it will serve as an automated approach towards a robotics real-time interaction with the human body. The proposed research offers a new way to allow users to understand the meaning of their vital signs using a human robot interaction. The developed system has been tested on publicly available data and simulated data. It can predict the future risk of heart disease based on some data attributes. Based on the risk prediction, it can feedback the result and the required lifestyle changes to avoid any related risk