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Personal health systems

eHealth

New Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) offer doctors significant new abilities to monitor patients’ conditions, thereby enabling them to diagnose problems earlier and treat them more effectively. The EU is supporting research into “personal health systems” under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

Monitoring a patient’s vital signs – heart rate and blood pressure for example – provides an important source of information to the doctor treating them. In the past, the only reliable means of checking such measurements has been for a medical professional to take them directly, or for a patient to be constantly monitored in hospital, which would normally only happen once they had become seriously ill. Whilst home monitoring equipment has been available for some purposes, such as blood pressure checks, medical professionals have doubted their reliability, preferring to use them only as indications of the patient’s status which need to be professionally verified. Moreover, informed medical decisions often require data on several related factors, which can be very difficult to obtain without the intervention of a trained professional.

ICTs offer the possibility of a new generation of lightweight monitoring systems which a patient can wear while going about their daily business, or which can be carried around easily and used regularly. Such new systems and tools can now provide much more reliable data on multiple parameters, and transmit them to remote locations, so that medical professionals can make better decisions on treatment without having to meet the patients face-to-face.

Monitoring
Diagnosis
Projects

Monitoring

FP7 funds will be used to support research into monitoring systems for patients with chronic diseases. In particular, such tools should provide improved quality of life for chronically ill patients, enabling them to stay at home rather than have to be admitted to hospitals. With ICT systems able to monitor a range of parameters related to the patient’s condition, medical professionals can take timely decisions on the most effective treatment. Automatic alerts ensure doctors are immediately made aware of changes in the patient’s condition and can respond to prevent severe deteriorations.

Personal health systems can also be used to monitor the condition of people at specific risk of developing illness, for example those with family history of a particular disease. By monitoring their patients' health status, doctors can identify problems at an early stage when the required treatment is simpler, more likely to be successful, and less costly.

Diagnosis

EU research funding is also targeting systems and tools which can be used for diagnostic purposes. These will give medical professionals much greater capabilities to assess a patient’s condition and decide on the correct treatment quickly. Such tools might be used to analyse blood samples on the spot, instead of having to send them to a laboratory. This assists not only in diagnosis but also in ensuring that the prescribed treatment is appropriate, for instance whether a patient is tolerant to a given drug, and that the most effective dose is given. In short, ICTs can provide doctors with highly effective diagnostic tools, to help them consider a wide range of possible problems and to decide rapidly on the right treatment.

Projects

In FP7, the Commission gives financial support for projects which seek to develop advanced ICT applications to develop Personal Health Systems.

AP@home - Bringing the artificial pancreas home (factsheet)
ARMOR
BRAVEHEALTH - Patient Centric Approach for an Integrated, Adaptive, Context Aware Remote Diagnosis and Management of Cardiovascular Diseases
CareToy
CD-Medics - Coeliac disease - management, monitoring and diagnosis using biosensors and an integrated chip system (factsheet)
Chronious - An open, ubiquitous and adaptive chronic disease management platform for COPD and renal insufficiency (factsheet)
CogWatch
Commodity12 - Continuous Multi-parametric and Multi-layered analysis of Diabetes Type 1 & 2 (factsheet)
CONTRAST
CuPiD
D-LIVER
Dem@Care - Dem@Care aspires to develop an innovative multi-parametric remote monitoring framework that will enable timely diagnosis, assessment, maintenance and promotion of self-independence of people with dementia (factsheet)
DIAdvisor - Personal Glucose Predictive Diabetes Advisor (factsheet)
HeartCycle - Compliance and effectiveness in HF and CAD closed-loop management (factsheet)
Help4Mood - A Computational Distributed System to Support the Treatment of Patients with Major Depression
iCARDEA - An Intelligent Platform for Personalized Remote Monitoring of the Cardiac Patients with Electronic Implant Devices (factsheet)
INTERACTION
ICT4DEPRESSION - User-friendly ICT tools to enhance self-management and effective treatment of depression in the EU
INTERSTRESS - Interreality in the management and treatment of stress-related disorders
MICHELANGELO
Metabo "Controlling Chronic Diseases related to Metabolic Disorders" (factsheet)
MONARCA - MONitoring, treAtment and pRediCtion of bipolAr Disorder Episodes (factsheet)
MovingLife
NEPHRON+ - ICT-enabled Wearable Artificial Kidney and Personal Renal Care System
OPTIMI - Online Predictive Tools for Intervention in Mental Illness (factsheet)
Perform "A sophisticated multi-parametric system for the continuous-effective assessment and monitoring of motor status in Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases" (factsheet)
PHS2020 "Road-mapping personal health systems: scenarios and research themes for Framework Programme 7th and beyond" (factsheet) - PHS2020 state of play - PHS2020 gap analysis - PHS2020 scenarios - PHS2020 roadmaps - PHS2020 book
Pocemon "Point-of-care monitoring and diagnostics for autoimmune diseases" (factsheet)
Preve - Prevention of Diseases (factsheet)
PSYCHE - Personalised monitoring SYstems for Care in mental HEalth
REACTION - Remote Accessibility to Diabetes Management and Therapy in Operational healthcare Networks
REMPARK
REWIRE
SCRIPT
SENSE-PARK
SensorART - A remote controlled Sensorized ARTificial heart enabling patients empowerment and new therapy approaches
SmartPersonalHealth - Interoperability of connected Personal Health Systems (PHS) with the wider eHealth domain – Promoting the smart delivery of health services
StrokeBack - Telemedicine System Empowering Stroke Patients to Fight Back (factsheet)
TBIcare "Evidence-based Diagnostic and Treatment Planning Solution for Traumatic Brain Injuries (factsheet)
TheraEdge "An integrated platform enabling Theranostic applications at the point of primary care" (factsheet)

A major conference (PHS 2007) in February 2007 rounded up a decade’s worth of research in the field of personal health systems, and fed into the planning of the first FP7 call in the field. Altogether, some €70 million of research funds was made available in 2007, and a range of projects are expected to get under way in early 2008.

Last update by the Editor (ehealth(AT)cec.eu.int): 01/02/12