Towards a mobile system for hypertensive outpatients' treatment adherence improvement

Covering more than a third of the population, arterial hypertension is a debilitating disease resulting in the adverse effect on the physical and emotional state of the patient and, hence, exerting the negative influence on the patient health- related quality of life. Treatment of hypertension involves the use of specific drug therapy along with a modification of a lifestyle and a diet over a long-term period. This, in turn, leads to the low adherence to the treatment among the ambulatory patients and, as a consequence, increases the chances of the hypertension-related complications, including the risk of sudden cardiac death. To address the problem of low adherence, we have previously proposed the mobile personal monitoring and assisting system constructed on the principles of smart spaces. The system relies on joint processing of both objective and subjective health measures accumulated in semantic ontology-driven storage enabling the construction of the personalized assisting services. In this paper, we extend the approach putting into consideration behaviour activities and interventions. Moreover, we propose the adherence assessment method based on the variety of user engagement measures, which also can be divided into subjective questionnaire-based measures, and objective metrics based on behaviour analysis and mobile app analytics

Towards a personal at-home lab for motion video tracking in patients with Parkinson's disease

Many digital healthcare services now employ the opportunities of mobile and smart Internet technologies. The Internet is used to deliver such services as medical consultations, diagnosis, and prescriptions. The services are constructed and delivered in the ubiquitous style - anywhere, anytime, and using surrounding devices of our everyday life. In this paper, we discuss the opportunities of motion video tracking in at-home settings for a patient. Parkinson's disease (PD) serves as a case study. First, we define the problem of motion video tracking in PD patients. Then, we consider Internet-enabled methods for motion video tracking, which are essentially restricted with professional settings of a medical environment. Finally, we propose to create a personal at-home lab based on such cheap home-based cameras as any smartphone has. Our early experiment shows that such cameras provide reliable capture quality for the practical use in PD patient motion video tracking

Nonlinear parameters of surface EMG in schizophrenia patients depend on kind of antipsychotic therapy

ArticleWe compared a set of surface EMG (sEMG) parameters in several groups of schizophrenia (SZ, n = 74) patients and healthy controls (n = 11) and coupled them with the clinical data. sEMG records were quantified with spectral, mutual information (MI) based and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) parameters, and with approximate and sample entropies (ApEn and SampEn). Psychotic deterioration was estimated with Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and with the positive subscale of PANSS. Neuroleptic-induced parkinsonism (NIP) motor symptoms were estimated with Simpson-Angus Scale (SAS). Dyskinesia was measured with Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale (AIMS). We found that there was no difference in values of sEMG parameters between healthy controls and drug-naïve SZ patients. The most specific group was formed of SZ patients who were administered both typical and atypical antipsychotics (AP). Their sEMG parameters were significantly different from those of SZ patients taking either typical or atypical AP or taking no AP. This may represent a kind of synergistic effect of these two classes of AP. For the clinical data we found that PANSS, SAS, and AIMS were not correlated to any of the sEMG parameters. Conclusion: with nonlinear parameters of sEMG it is possible to reveal NIP in SZ patients, and it may help to discriminate between different clinical groups of SZ patients. Combined typical and atypical AP therapy has stronger effect on sEMG than a therapy with AP of only one class.Publisher's pdfhttp://purl.org/eprint/status/PeerReviewe

On the Semantic Approach to Service Development for Socio-Cyber-Medicine Systems

In a Cyber-Medicine System (CMS), the Internet is used to deliver healthcare services, such as medical consultations, diagnosis, and prescriptions. Services allow end-users (patients) online access to consultations and treatment with medical professionals. When the services benefit from the end-users activity and collaborative work, then the system becomes Social CMS (SCMS). In this position paper, we discuss how SCMS can be implemented based on the semantic approach. As in the generic case of smart environments, an additional layer is introduced— the semantic layer, where all system and domain objects are virtually integrated: multisource data, ongoing processes, situation attributes, reasoning rules, and human activity. The objects are dynamically related leading to a knowledge-rich structure in the form of a semantic network. Semantic algorithms are used for data mining in this network. The derived knowledge feeds construction of context-aware information services to support medical professionals as well as to assist mobile patients

Parameters of Surface Electromyogram Suggest That Dry Immersion Relieves Motor Symptoms in Patients With Parkinsonism

Dry immersion (DI) is acknowledged as a reliable space flight analog condition. At DI, subject is immersed in water being wrapped in a waterproof film to imitate microgravity (μG). Microgravity is known to decrease muscle tone due to deprivation of the sensory stimuli that activate the reflexes that keep up the muscle tone. In contrary, parkinsonian patients are characterized by elevated muscle tone, or rigidity, along with rest tremor and akinesia. We hypothesized that DI can diminish the elevated muscle tone and/or the tremor in parkinsonian patients. Fourteen patients with Parkinson's disease (PD, 10 males, 4 females, 47–73 years) and 5 patients with vascular parkinsonism (VP, 1 male, 4 females, 65–72 years) participated in the study. To evaluate the effect of DI on muscles' functioning, we compared parameters of surface electromyogram (sEMG) measured before and after a single 45-min long immersion session. The sEMG recordings were made from the biceps brachii muscle, bilaterally. Each recording was repeated with the following loading conditions: with arms hanging freely down, and with 0, 1, and 2 kg loading on each hand with elbows flexed to 90°. The sEMG parameters comprised of amplitude, median frequency, time of decay of mutual information, sample entropy, correlation dimension, recurrence rate, and determinism of sEMG. These parameters have earlier been proved to be sensitive to PD severity. We used the Wilcoxon test to decide which parameters were statistically significantly different before and after the dry immersion. Accepting the p < 0.05 significance level, amplitude, time of decay of mutual information, recurrence rate, and determinism tended to decrease, while median frequency and sample entropy of sEMG tended to increase after the DI. The most statistically significant change was for the determinism of sEMG from the left biceps with 1 kg loading, which decreased for 84% of the patients. The results suggest that DI can promptly relieve motor symptoms of parkinsonism. We conclude that DI has strong potential as a rehabilitation method for parkinsonian patients