Objective
Background
The asthma disease is a significant cause of morbidity world-wide. It is estimated that some 155 million people, equivalent to the population of Russia, suffer from the condition and the number is increasing. As such it represents a major health hazard and accounts for substantial direct medical costs.
Asthma and allergic rhinitis are the result of a sensitisation of the body to allergens, the most common of which are pollens. From past experience, allergy sufferers have a reasonably accurate idea of when and where their particular pollen allergen will appear. But they do not have current accurate information, and so they treat only after the response has developed. What they lack is some real-time and accurate forecast information to tell them the actual pollen concentrations, type and location.
Project objective
The objective of the A.S.T.H.M.A. project is to provide near real time accurate information on aeroallergens and air quality to the sensitive users on an individual basis and at specific locations to help them in optimising their medication and improve their quality of life.
We propose to build an integrated, multi-disciplinary information system to implement that new service. The system will integrate a large number of improvements in existing components:
- automation of pollen measurement networks, including pollen recognition byimage processing
- spaceborne remote sensing of the sub-micrometer particles
- numerical forecasting of allergen dispersion by the atmosphere - multi-media distribution of forecast information
A pharmaceutics laboratory is leading the project and will put a high priority to the value and the accuracy of the final product. The system forecasts will be validated against clinical and epidemiological knowledge. The impact of coupling between allergens and air pollutants will be evaluated from correlation between measured data and medical surveys.
Expectations
Two key social benefits are expected from the operational A.S.T.H.M.A. system. The first is the ability of the allergic sufferers, with accurate and immediate information on the status of the pollens they are allergic to, to plan their lives and medication appropriately. The second is the economic benefits which would follow from the more effective planning of their daily lives and health care by sufferers:
- diminishing the loss of their personal productivity,
- direct saving on prescription and medication costs,
- decreasing the demand on emergency treatrnent in hospitals.
Three major scientific benefits can be considered as direct outcomes of the A.S.T.H.M.A. project, regarding
- satellite observation of small particles for health application, raisinga new opportunity for the upcoming generation of space-bome missions, - a major improvement of the in situ pollen counting networks and datacollection, the interest of which concerns biology, agriculture... - correlation analysis of coupled aeroallergen concentration and air quality onthe respiratory affections will provide answer to emerging public healthconcerns.
Finally, the industry leading the A.S.T H.M.A. team will use this system as a marketing application to create direct contacts and exchanges with their customers and also with local health authorities: hospital, doctors, allergists...
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine pneumology asthma
- medical and health sciences basic medicine pharmacology and pharmacy pharmaceutical drugs
- engineering and technology environmental engineering remote sensing
- engineering and technology environmental engineering air pollution engineering
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine allergology
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Coordinator
20091 Bresso
Italy
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.