What if you experienced a serious health event and risk this happening again, unless you change your lifestyle?

"Modern medical procedures often treat the medical condition with appropriate drugs and care regimes, but usually do not include a behaviour change component", says project expert Ben Fletcher, Health Psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire and co-founder of the British 'Do Something Different' website. "Yet research suggests that following a serious medical event, as many as 90% of people who are advised to change their behaviour to reduce the risk of further problems, fail to do so."

The EU-co-funded Do Change project will guide patients to make these often difficult, but critical lifestyle changes such as losing weight, lowering salt or calorie intake or raising activity levels. The project will initially focus on patients with complex high blood pressure, heart disease or heart failure.

Monitoring and a 'Do programme'

Fletcher: "We aim to bring inputs from medical devices and sensors and cardiovascular care teams together in a patient-centred health ecosystem. Put simply, the patient will monitor their condition and what they eat at home with the new devices which feed into the 'Do Change' system. This will inform the kind of lifestyle changes required, which in turn will help to shape a Do programme in near real-time."

The patient will receive 'Do’s' designed by the project's psychologists to encourage him or her to make the changes the cardiology team suggests they need to make for their long-term health.

Doctors have access

"Of course the patients' doctors also have access to the system and will monitor the medical data and the behaviour change feedback to ensure that each patient is making progress", says Fletcher.

Do Change is a collaboration between 11 organisations in the EU and Taiwan. The project will have a budget of €4.6m from the EU over three years funded under the EU Horizon funding programme with an additional €1m from the Taiwanese government. The organisations met in Eindhoven in February to kick off the project.

Within one year there will be a first evaluation of the new Do Change health ecosystem. Project management expert Roz Sutton says: "The first steps are to look at how we can technically integrate our Do Something Different system with inputs from sources from our partners."

Source: Do Something Different