Mobile-Health control for citizens

The motivation for this project proposal comes from the lack of widely accepted mHealth solutions, despite the world of ubiquitous mHealth enabling digital devices, being developed to provide improved medical care with reduced costs. Perhaps the most distinguished among these devices are the wearable wireless sensors, which have become advanced enough to provide reliable physiological readings for health management. On the other hand, the cloud technologies have matured enough to provide reliable and secure instant capacities that are well suited for connecting the mHealth users and the medical personnel using the ubiquitous smart phones and tablets that can process data and offer users aggregated and user friendly information about their health. So far the users' personal disposition towards the technologies required by mHealth remains the main problem for its wider acceptance. The key weakness lies in the majority of attention focuses on technology, while the importance of its acceptance by users and health care practitioners is largely neglected. In contrary to the past practice, the proposed project poses the following question: what benefit might mHealth bring to users and to the national health system as a whole? To answer the question, first the main actors are identified: patients or healthy users, the people close to them, and the medical institutions. Then their desires are identified: monitoring in daily activities, disease self-management, and simplified care for patients or relatives. Then the subset of parameters is selected for health monitoring and physical activity/motion. The project partners will collect these measurable parameters together with the data on how the stakeholders use the system. The collected data will be used to improve the mHealth systems in a closed loop and to provide valuable answers and guidance on how to increase the users’ acceptance. The ambition of project is to make mHealth into a mainstream solution for modern healthcare. The biomedical part of the project (co-design with patients and other users, sensor data processing, decision algorithms) will be implemented in cooperation among medical experts from the related areas (cardiology, neurology, psychiatry) that confirmed their great interests, users and their caregivers which are ready to cooperate, volunteers that need additional support for their work in dangerous conditions (firemen), and innovative bioengineering SMEs that could contribute their ideas and know-how into the whole system. The technical part of the project including data communication, processing, manipulation, storage and archiving, can be implemented as a set of mHealth services under eventual prolongation of Competence center KC-CLASS (CLoud ASsisted Services) with successful industrial and academic partners involved in CLASS activities. The project will be supported by a reliable communication platform (IskraTel) and by a dedicated cloud resources and services developed within competent members of CLASS and eventual new members that will contribute their expertise.