Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PROCare4Life (PeRsOnalized Integrated CARE Solution for Elderly facing several short or long term conditions and enabling a better quality of LIFE)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-01-01 bis 2023-06-30
Almost 10 million Europeans live with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other dementias today. As a result of ageing, the number of people affected by one of those conditions is forecasted to double by 2030, introducing major challenges.
The ageing of the population is also leading to significant reforms in long-term care policy and systems in many EU countries, increasing the need for alternatives.
These challenges can benefit from an integrated care platform, able to establish correlations between comorbidities, investigate the use of polypharmacy, mitigate potential arising health risks, study social variables as well as promote unified treatment procedures or social services needs. Such a solution could help patients, caregivers and socio-health professionals to manage several diseases. Furthermore, people suffering from the aforementioned chronic diseases experience difficulties in their daily life and in living alone and require specialized care services and treatments, which imposes high burdens on the public budget, requiring special attention for properly addressing the sustainability of the socio-health system in Europe.
PROCare4Life tackles several socio-economic and technical challenges.
The objectives of PROCare4Life are to: a) provide an integrated scalable and interactive care ecosystem for neurodegenerative diseases and adaptable to other chronic conditions; b) Improve the quality of life/services of all involved users in the care delivery system, both patients, their caregivers and socio-health professionals; c) provide flexible and personalized assistance to patients affected by neurodegenerative and/or other chronic diseases; d) solution validation through large scale real-life integrated care platform deployment and assessment; e) stimulate new emerging business solutions and job creation opportunities; f) adopt and respect ethical, legal and privacy aspects; g) promote standardization of the proposed solution using a clinical and clerical data repository; h) dissemination of the project results among national health services
The ageing of the population is also leading to significant reforms in long-term care policy and systems in many EU countries, increasing the need for alternatives.
These challenges can benefit from an integrated care platform, able to establish correlations between comorbidities, investigate the use of polypharmacy, mitigate potential arising health risks, study social variables as well as promote unified treatment procedures or social services needs. Such a solution could help patients, caregivers and socio-health professionals to manage several diseases. Furthermore, people suffering from the aforementioned chronic diseases experience difficulties in their daily life and in living alone and require specialized care services and treatments, which imposes high burdens on the public budget, requiring special attention for properly addressing the sustainability of the socio-health system in Europe.
PROCare4Life tackles several socio-economic and technical challenges.
The objectives of PROCare4Life are to: a) provide an integrated scalable and interactive care ecosystem for neurodegenerative diseases and adaptable to other chronic conditions; b) Improve the quality of life/services of all involved users in the care delivery system, both patients, their caregivers and socio-health professionals; c) provide flexible and personalized assistance to patients affected by neurodegenerative and/or other chronic diseases; d) solution validation through large scale real-life integrated care platform deployment and assessment; e) stimulate new emerging business solutions and job creation opportunities; f) adopt and respect ethical, legal and privacy aspects; g) promote standardization of the proposed solution using a clinical and clerical data repository; h) dissemination of the project results among national health services
Throughout the 42-month journey, the consortium kept a strong commitment to achieving the planned objectives. Despite the challenges, the consortium can proudly say the mission succeeded.
The work, conducted across the WP, focused on the 4 key pillars:
1. PC4L User-Centred Design Approach |Users' involvement was crucial from its inception. Their feedback was instrumental in shaping the PC4L solution to meet their needs/requirements.
2. The PC4L's Digital Solution integrated wearable sensors, mobile app, cloud-based data storage, and an integrated care platform. PC4L aimed to improve the QoL of individuals with neurodegenerative and chronic diseases, offering tailored support and services.
3. Throughout the project, the consortium successfully implemented 3 Real-life pilots across 6 pilot sites, spanning 5 countries and in 3 scenarios (home, rehabilitation, and daycare). Each pilot represented a critical step in testing the effectiveness and feasibility of the PROCare4Life platform in real-world settings
4. Overcoming challenges and embracing growth in PC4L | From the PC4L consortium experience, users, pilot studies, and the development process, the consortium aimed to provide meaningful insights that contribute to the consortium's growth and inspire future digital health and care solutions projects. The consortium disseminated and will continue to disseminate the results and lessons learned.
The work, conducted across the WP, focused on the 4 key pillars:
1. PC4L User-Centred Design Approach |Users' involvement was crucial from its inception. Their feedback was instrumental in shaping the PC4L solution to meet their needs/requirements.
2. The PC4L's Digital Solution integrated wearable sensors, mobile app, cloud-based data storage, and an integrated care platform. PC4L aimed to improve the QoL of individuals with neurodegenerative and chronic diseases, offering tailored support and services.
3. Throughout the project, the consortium successfully implemented 3 Real-life pilots across 6 pilot sites, spanning 5 countries and in 3 scenarios (home, rehabilitation, and daycare). Each pilot represented a critical step in testing the effectiveness and feasibility of the PROCare4Life platform in real-world settings
4. Overcoming challenges and embracing growth in PC4L | From the PC4L consortium experience, users, pilot studies, and the development process, the consortium aimed to provide meaningful insights that contribute to the consortium's growth and inspire future digital health and care solutions projects. The consortium disseminated and will continue to disseminate the results and lessons learned.
PROCare4Life project was built upon an integrated scalable and interactive care ecosystem to respond to different challenges:
- Integration – PROCare4Life aims to offer analytical, multimodal, and personalized models focused on events that can affect the sense of safety, independence and well-being of the elderly. To this end, a series of sensorial and algorithmic methods were developed to track the senior's activities, learn them, and provide feedback in a personalized manner.
- Personalization – PROCare4Life aimed to provide adaptable and easy-to-personalize interactions. Personalization and user modeling are based on several individual factors summarized in four categories (motor functions, cognitive abilities, physical activities, and sleep) and others directly collected by the sensorial ecosystem. Dedicated user profiles were built based on the learned daily behavioural patterns, the detected symptoms relevant to the main diseases, and other information the users' provided. The recommendations were designed to induce healthy user changes, focusing on the patients and Health and Care Professionals (useful decision-support information).
- Adaptation – PROCare4Life integrated sensorial ecosystem monitoring information into its algorithms and other crucial information, such as the presence of comorbidities and medication, which supports timely and personalized adaptation of the care management. PROCare4Life provided multimodal data analysis techniques for extracting conclusions regarding possible correlations of the observed symptoms with changes in medication, comorbidities, and evaluations of health and social professionals. Furthermore, using unsupervised or semi-supervised learning techniques, groups of patients with neurodegenerative or/and chronic diseases were created based on their disease stage, physical characteristics, temporal evolution, and medical information to enable a more efficient management system, health condition monitoring, care delivery and recommendation formulations. Still, regarding the adaptation, the PROcare4Life technological solution evolved grounded in the users' needs and requirements.
- Communication – PROCare4Life aimed to allow better patient-professional communication outside of the clinical setting, consistent monitoring of signs and symptoms, a personalized characterization of the patients and their clinical evolution, a timely follow-up, and a safer, better quality of life for patients and caregivers. In this context, PROCare4Life solution may support the therapy schedule optimization, often complicated and confusing for them and their caregivers, especially in the presence of comorbidities (monitoring pharmacotherapy, opening virtual dialogue between users, filling the gap of continuity between outpatient visits and ensuring consistent care and side-effects timely checks).
- Security and Privacy – PROCare4Life implemented in the technological solution all necessary mechanisms, such as encryption, pseudonymization, and data minimization, to ensure data protection, security and privacy, and legal compliance support.
- Flexibility – The PROCare4Life platform was designed to improve the satisfaction, time-management and learning curve of the involved actors in the care process through user-friendly interfaces, improved access and means to update the health repositories, creation of appointment notes and better tracking of the health condition. Furthermore, by closely planning and monitoring the care pathway in different scenarios and for users with different needs, PROCare4Life planned to strengthen its market potential.
- Multi-disciplinarity – PROCare4Life aimed to support a wide number of senior users suffering from neurodegenerative or other chronic diseases, their caregivers, and social and health professionals involved in the care process. The results of the large-scale pilot, and the replicability study will be available open source.
- Integration – PROCare4Life aims to offer analytical, multimodal, and personalized models focused on events that can affect the sense of safety, independence and well-being of the elderly. To this end, a series of sensorial and algorithmic methods were developed to track the senior's activities, learn them, and provide feedback in a personalized manner.
- Personalization – PROCare4Life aimed to provide adaptable and easy-to-personalize interactions. Personalization and user modeling are based on several individual factors summarized in four categories (motor functions, cognitive abilities, physical activities, and sleep) and others directly collected by the sensorial ecosystem. Dedicated user profiles were built based on the learned daily behavioural patterns, the detected symptoms relevant to the main diseases, and other information the users' provided. The recommendations were designed to induce healthy user changes, focusing on the patients and Health and Care Professionals (useful decision-support information).
- Adaptation – PROCare4Life integrated sensorial ecosystem monitoring information into its algorithms and other crucial information, such as the presence of comorbidities and medication, which supports timely and personalized adaptation of the care management. PROCare4Life provided multimodal data analysis techniques for extracting conclusions regarding possible correlations of the observed symptoms with changes in medication, comorbidities, and evaluations of health and social professionals. Furthermore, using unsupervised or semi-supervised learning techniques, groups of patients with neurodegenerative or/and chronic diseases were created based on their disease stage, physical characteristics, temporal evolution, and medical information to enable a more efficient management system, health condition monitoring, care delivery and recommendation formulations. Still, regarding the adaptation, the PROcare4Life technological solution evolved grounded in the users' needs and requirements.
- Communication – PROCare4Life aimed to allow better patient-professional communication outside of the clinical setting, consistent monitoring of signs and symptoms, a personalized characterization of the patients and their clinical evolution, a timely follow-up, and a safer, better quality of life for patients and caregivers. In this context, PROCare4Life solution may support the therapy schedule optimization, often complicated and confusing for them and their caregivers, especially in the presence of comorbidities (monitoring pharmacotherapy, opening virtual dialogue between users, filling the gap of continuity between outpatient visits and ensuring consistent care and side-effects timely checks).
- Security and Privacy – PROCare4Life implemented in the technological solution all necessary mechanisms, such as encryption, pseudonymization, and data minimization, to ensure data protection, security and privacy, and legal compliance support.
- Flexibility – The PROCare4Life platform was designed to improve the satisfaction, time-management and learning curve of the involved actors in the care process through user-friendly interfaces, improved access and means to update the health repositories, creation of appointment notes and better tracking of the health condition. Furthermore, by closely planning and monitoring the care pathway in different scenarios and for users with different needs, PROCare4Life planned to strengthen its market potential.
- Multi-disciplinarity – PROCare4Life aimed to support a wide number of senior users suffering from neurodegenerative or other chronic diseases, their caregivers, and social and health professionals involved in the care process. The results of the large-scale pilot, and the replicability study will be available open source.