Digitally enabled health service for the integrated management of hypertension: A participatory user-centred design process

This article describes a user-centred approach taken by a group of five procurers to set specifications for the procurement of value-based research and development services for IT-sup-ported integrated hypertension management. The approach considered the unmet needs of patients and health systems of the involved regions. The procurers established a framework for requirements and a solution design consisting of nine building blocks, divided into three domains: service delivery, devices and integration, and health care organisation. The approach included the development of questionnaires, capturing patients’ and professionals’ views on possible system functionalities, and a template collecting information about the organisation of healthcare, professionals involved and existing IT systems at the procurers’ premises. A total of 28 patients diagnosed with hypertension and 26 professionals were interviewed. The interviewees identified 98 functional requirements, grouped in the nine building blocks. A total of nine use cases and their corresponding process models were defined by the procurers’ working group. As result, a digitally enabled integrated approach to hypertension has been designed to allow citizens to learn how to prevent the development of hypertension and lead a healthy lifestyle, and to receive comprehensive, individualised treatment in close collaboration with healthcare professionals

ADVICE project: final balance and future perspectives

The increase of the complexity of present ICs and the evolution of the technological design rules have enhanced the request of new techniques to evaluate the real behaviour of VLSI circuits. E-beam based techniques have shown to be a winning approach to examine the internal electrical and logical status of the circuit. The scanning electron beam microscope can be really useful in IC bugging procedures if it is deeply integrated with the design environment. The ESPRIT project 271 ADVICE aimed to automate the electron beam tester, creating a link toward the design data. The foreground of the project is going to be a commercial product. Furthermore the basis for new researchers have been established