Objective
The main objective of IREP is the creation of a European Information System to contribute to the modernisation and organisation of the Rehabilitation field.
A European Information System is being developed to contribute to the modernization and organization of the rehabilitation field.
A common European co framework is being built and effective and viable information technology (IT) in tools to support the rehabilitation of people with different types of physical h prototyped.
Definition of a formal model of the rehabilitation process has begu account all possible actors, resources involved, medical practices and so on.
Th been checked in some concrete application scenarios: public health, patient mana research. Significant categories of users have been identified: patients, famili volunteer associations, rehabilitation specialists, IT industry, local authoriti health care planners, international organisations.
For each category of users, t requirements have also been set. As a conclusion the general architecture of the has been defined.
Prototyping and testing in a real site has started. Due to the time and resources, it was decided to perform a limited experiment, with respect functionalities provided and the categories of users targeted.
Rehabilitation Medicine is a very new and unexplored experience in Europe. The field, instead of being perceived as a new beginning for the rehabilitation patient, is associated mostly as the last, desperate and rather conclusive step of patient's medical experience. Due to the combined disorganisation, unemployment and lack of communication among rehabilitators that characterise most European regions, patients do not reach their full therapeutic and restorative capabilities. This does not only confine the broader quality of life aspects for the patient but it creates a heavier burden on the society that has to support the quasi-rehabilitated patients in the ranks of unemployed and disabled citizens.
The aim of the IREP Consortium in addressing this area of work is to build a common European conceptual frame-work and to prototype effective and viable IT infrastructures and tools to support the rehabilitation of people with different types of physical handicaps.
The main outcomes of the project will be:
- Information Bases of available rehabilitation protocols and procedures to support the exchange of information and the harmonisation of practices through different European countries,
- Front Ends to access pre-existing relevant Services and Data Banks in this area.
- a Workstation environment for rehabilitation specialists and operators,
- a Workstation environment to support rehabilitation at home,
- Test Beds experimenting the system.
The technological scope of the project is very large because Rehabilitation is fairly new as an independent discipline and therefore it exhibits a large number of needs which must be addressed in a unified way: at one end the requirement of moving the rehabilitation process from the hospital to home in order to favour the integration of the handicapped inside his/her family and social context. At other end, the requirement, from the community of R&D specialists, for a high level of interworking between different Centres in different Countries for the definition of widely-accepted new rehabilitation protocols, for the harmonisation of existing ones and for sharing know-how and experiences.
The scientific baseline of IREP is an innovative approach to rehabilitation based on the following key issues:
- a trans-disciplinary view of Rehabilitation considered as a global discipline which involves the cooperation of different medical disciplines like cardiology, cardiosurgery, neurology, orthopaedics, plastic surgery, urology, psychology, etc.
- a view of rehabilitation not as single step in the patient's care process, but as a continuous procedure which starts at the moment when an injury or disease is detected.
- need for levels of functionalities and services to be efficiently used by a wide range of operators, from single patients to care operators and rehabilitation specialists.
The project has been planned over two phases, IREP 1 and IREP 2, with a total estimated effort of approximately 300 man months for each phase and with a duration of three years.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
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20124 Milano
Italy