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.
