Objective
The HEARTS (Health Early Alarm Recognition and Telemonitoring System) Research wants to create a new Family of Tele-Health Systems being:
- non-intrusive - information will be acquired through "wearable" sensors;
- dynamic - the systems will be able to continuously monitor information and about the health status and relate it to the specific context in which the person is acting (activity, environmental conditions, history), individually adapting its behaviour;
- intelligent - capable to offer dynamic intelligent alert functions directly to the citizen;
- with advanced and adaptive decision support capability - integrating classical analysis techniques with new techniques and approaches, such as Neural Network Analysis and Non-Linear Analysis to reflect the specific health behaviour of each person;
- interoperable - services must be available for people moving in a trans-national context;
- based on an open architecture - to be enhanced or expanded with the simple addition or replacement of existing components with the new ones available in the market;
- focused on disease prediction rather that diagnosis, thus offering classical and innovative services not only to ill and high-risk people, but also healthy ones making for instance highly stressing jobs.
Objectives:
The project will pursue the following main objectives:
1. Definition and promotion of HEARTS as a reference architecture and framework for a new generation of open convergent health care systems;
2. Design and development of the main technological components of a new personal health status monitoring system, based on the defined Reference Architecture, focused on Heart Diseases and with the following characteristics: non-intrusive, with advanced adaptive decision support capability, interoperable, based o an open architecture. The implemented components will be:
a. the Decision Support Functional Module;
b. the Personal Health Wireless Network subsystem;
3. Feasibility study about Centralised Monitoring subsystem and potential new services.
Work description:
Aim of HEARTS is to introduce some new technological concepts within the framework of existing telemedicine systems architecture:
- the concept of Extended Personal Health Wireless Network
The network will be made of different classes of Adaptive Intelligent Components.
These components will be, for instance, wearable intelligent and non-intrusive sensors. Intelligent sensors will be able to gather specific biometric signals but also non-health information such as environmental data (temperature, for instance) and will be able to dynamically interconnect each other through a wireless network.
It will also be composed of other peripheral and devices, being able to automatically interface each other. These other devices could offer local HCI, or could interconnect the Extended Personal Health Wireless Network to other networks (LAN, WAN, Internet, GSM/GPRS/UMTS, HF/UHF/VHF).
The Extended Personal Health Wireless Network will implement the concept of Self-Adaptive Components Interaction: this concept is described below with more detail;
- the concept of decision support functionality, integrating classical health status analysis techniques with advanced ones such as Neural Network Analysis and Non-Linear Analysis.
The proposed technological infrastructure is needed to allow the researched framework to be able to implement two main behavioural concepts:
- the concept of Adaptive Components and Actors Interaction
Each single component of the framework, being it a biometric sensor, an interface peripheral or an information transport device, has its own intelligence, making it able to offer some basic health care functionality. All these intelligent components of the framework will be able to automatically declare it and interact with each other, to constitute a higher level of intelligence, and consequently a higher level of health care services (self-adaptive components interaction).
On the other hand, different actors (being them patients, medical experts inside an hospital, medical experts at an accident site) need a different access to the information network, depending on their own knowledge level. The access is made possible by means of specific devices, which are able to self-adapt their own interaction with other components depending on the specific context.
This concept can be recursively applied, thus constituting a self-organising system able to collapse or expand its own knowledge, depending on specific circumstances and needs;
- the concept of Adaptive Behavioural Analysis
Each person has his own health behaviour: a specific health status could be dangerous for someone or a common status for someone else. Actually this characteristic represents the main factor hampering research in this domain. The purpose of this research is to design and build a self-adaptive model of specific health behaviours, by means of learning capable technologies as neural networks or time series non-linear analysis.
The implemented model will take into account bio-metric signals together with environmental information and other parameters. The objective is to obtain anytime information about the expected health status related to the specific person and the specific context, in order to be compared with the actual health status measured by biometric sensors. A difference between expected and actual configuration could be a symptom of an unusual health status to be in depth analysed through the decision support functionality implemented in the system or by medical experts working in the remote centres.
The aims of these concepts is to apply and extend the paradigm anyone, anywhere, anytime adding the further item adaptively.
Milestones:
The following 10 main milestones are planned:T0 Kick-off Meeting;
T0+4 M2.1 - User Requirement Report;
T0+9 M3.2 - Reference Architecture;
T0+10 M3.1 - Prototype Architecture;
T0+20 M4.2 - Decision Support Subsystem (HW/SW);
T0+20 M5.2 - Personal Health Network Subsystem (HW/SW);
T0+20 M6.2 - Central Management Subsystem (Feasibility Study);
T0+24 M7.4 - HEARTS components demonstrators completed;
T0+24 M8.2 - Verification & Validation ReportT0+24 End of Project.
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternet
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencecomputational intelligence
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
00143 ROMA
Italy