PERSONAL HEALTH EMPOWERMENT
Empowering Personal Healthcare
Empowering people to monitor and improve their health using personal data and digital coaching
Developments in technology have enabled the empowerment of people for self-care more than ever before. Smart phones and tablets and quantified self-style self-monitoring wellness devices are common place. Wellness oriented solutions often suffer from short-term used due to quickly diminishing interest from their users and from lack of possibilities to utilise them in conjunction with clinical healthcare treatments. Patients are left alone with their problems in between therapy or treatment, and the possibly collected personal data is left unused. Perceptions in psychology and gamification allow for approaches to keep people engaged and achieve the desired health impact.
Project overview
Partners: 8 from 4 countries
Start Date: January 2018
Ending Date: December 2020
Effort: 55.18 PY
Cluster: ITEA 3
About Project
Rising costs of healthcare due to the ageing population and related increase of non-communicative diseases urges for finding ways to save expenses by diminishing the need for care and making current care more efficient. Health authorities and care providers are finally noticing the one resource that had remained unused in the care provision process – the person or patient him/herself! By starting with the primary need of the person – to be healthy – and including him/her into the process in an active role, new paradigms for care become possible. Significant cost reductions can be achieved by preventive solutions to help the person adopt a healthy lifestyle – thus reducing the number of patients – and by providing the person with tools to actively participate in the treatment when diseases do arise – thus decreasing the pressure on health care professionals.
This project is addressing these challenges in healthcare by providing support to this additional resource in care – the person him/herself – to better manage own health related behaviour and participate actively in care.
Wellness oriented solutions often suffer from short-term use due to quickly diminishing interest from their users and from lack of possibilities to utilise them in conjunction with clinical healthcare treatments.Patients are left alone with their problems in between therapy or treatment sessions, and the possibly collected personal data is left unused.
Developments in technology have enabled the empowerment of people for self-care more than ever before. Quantified self –type activity and basic physiological measurements in daily life are becoming common place and data accumulates in personal health records allowing for personal access and research. Smart phones and tablets can be found in nearly every home and people – including the elderly – become increasingly digitally literate, allowing preventive and life-style coaching applications to reach a large community of people (not just patients) with little effort.
The project has potentially a large impact on healthcare provision in the future.
It will help to provide both evidence and means to targeted and preventive healthcare and allow for cost-saving self- and home-care solutions with increased patient involvement. It therefore will contribute to the societal challenges related to ageing and the rising dependency ratio, lifestyle-related diseases, as well as healthcare challenges to provide care in a more personalised and efficient way.
Preventive health services are in the interest of public health, but increasingly also of occupational health providers and the employers contracting them. Preventive health service providers contract coaching service developers, hosting services, and data management and analysis services in a similar way to other health providers.
Data aggregation services consist of health information systems run by health service providers and personal health records and more informal cloud-based health data services run by public health or internet service providers. Data analytics as a service is a rising phenomenon driven by new big data opportunities and intelligent data analysis solutions. Business models are still being pioneered in this area.
Objective and Innovations
The main goal of this project is to empower people to monitor and improve their health using personal data and technology assisted coaching. Innovations in the project are expected in 1) reliable ways to self-measure, 2) analytics on heterogeneous personal health sources to provide insight in the relation between behaviour and health, 3) methodologies to develop interactive, dynamic and personalised coaching programmes, 4) modularisation and standardisation of a scalable coaching framework, 5) innovative motivating approaches for long-term adherence, 6) bridging the gap between wellness and care, 7) innovative business models for preventive, self- and homecare.
Partners & Consortium
You can find more information about partners and related companies.
Belgium Companies & Consortium
The non-profit association IDEWE (https://www.idewe.be ) is the largest Belgian occupational service for well-being at work (external service for prevention and protection at work). Its two divisions ‘Medical Surveillance’ and ‘Risk Management’ offer a comprehensive selection of services to companies and organizations.
IDEWE
The non-profit association IDEWE (https://www.idewe.be ) is the largest Belgian occupational service for well-being at work (external service for prevention and protection at work). Its two divisions ‘Medical Surveillance’ and ‘Risk Management’ offer a comprehensive selection of services to companies and organizations. IDEWE has over 700 qualified staff members, servicing 35 000 employers and 650 000 employees, both in the private and the public sectors.
IDEWE disposes of a department of Knowledge, Information and Research which consists of 26 co-workers including 19 researchers, specialized in questionnaire studies and analysis of medical and exposure data for companies and sectors. IDEWE also provides environmental services, energy management and industrial hygiene (e.g. assessment of exposure and asbestos lab).
IDEWE works closely together with academic centres of the main Flemish Universities. Several researchers are affiliated with an academic institution. The department of Knowledge, Information and Research has been involved in several projects funded by European Social Fund, EU-OSHA, national governmental bodies..
Belgium Companies & Consortium
KU Leuven/Augment (http://augment.cs.kuleuven.be ), Research in the Augment group focuses on how end-users interact with personalized systems, such as recommender systems, personalized search and targeted advertisement.The objective is to enable end-users to understand the rationale of such systems ..
KU Leuven/Augment
KU Leuven/Augment (http://augment.cs.kuleuven.be ), Research in the Augment group focuses on how end-users interact with personalized systems, such as recommender systems, personalized search and targeted advertisement. The objective is to enable end-users to understand the rationale of such systems and to enable them to steer the personalization process with input and feedback. The focus is on visualization and interaction techniques, using the full spectrum of hardware from small mobile devices to large multi-touch displays. Applications include learning analytics, precision agriculture, healthcare, media consumption, and digital humanities.
KU Leuven will participate in the ‘Personal Health Empowerment’ project from 2 points of view: “Data Analytics” and “Coaching/Empowerment”.
Research groups participating in the “Data Analytics” research are eMedia & AdvISe with some support by ReMi. Partner for coaching engine development is Augment-HCI.
Portugese Companies & Consortium
GECAD (http://www.gecad.isep.ipp.pt ) is the largest of those R&D units, and includes 53 PhD researchers. GECAD works in the area of intelligent systems and its application to real problems, particularly in the area of engineering.
ISEP - GECAD
The Polytechnic Institute of Porto (IPP) was created in 1985 as a result of the 1979 re-definition of the national education strategy which reinstated the Polytechnic Higher Education. Presently IPP is composed of seven schools with statutory, scientific, pedagogic, cultural and administrative autonomy as determined by law.
In 2011 over 17.000 students attended the seven Schools located in 5 cities within the Porto district. ISEP, the School of Engineering of IPP, is an institution recognized as a fundamental contribution to the development of Portuguese industry, granted by the quality of technical graduates and the long history of training generations of professionals. ISEP includes 9 R&D units, recognized by Portuguese scientific institutions and also internationally, that involve senior researchers and students in actual and forthcoming areas of interest.
GECAD (http://www.gecad.isep.ipp.pt ) is the largest of those R&D units, and includes 53 PhD researchers. GECAD works in the area of intelligent systems and its application to real problems, particularly in the area of engineering. Scientific research application areas include, emergence management , production systems, education and intelligent tutoring systems, inclusive systems, genetics, health, markets, power and energy systems. New areas and paradigms are covered such as semantic web, ambient intelligence, cyber-physical systems, smart grids and smart cities. GECAD research contribution to the state of the art in the fields in which it acts can be organized threefold: part of the work is dedicated to the development of basic methodologies and techniques that can be applied in a large set of fields; part of the work is dedicated to specific-purpose fields; and more recently some work has been dedicated to aspects like technology transfer and innovation. The basic methodologies and technologies used by GECAD cover aspects that range from the hardware to the smart software useful for the development of Intelligent Engineering Systems. This hardware includes all the automation devices useful for sensing, monitoring, and controlling Intelligent Engineering Systems. However, GECAD centres the attention in the intelligent use of this hardware, so research in intelligent systems, decision support systems, and knowledge based systems are the main focus of GECAD.
Here we can refer work in areas like machine learning, optimization, planning, scheduling, modelling, simulation, intelligent interaction, ontologies and knowledge representation, affective computing, and ambient intelligence. In these areas GECAD is recognized as a very relevant international player, achieving remarkable scores in top-level scientific journals
Portugese Companies & Consortium
MEDIDA (http://www.medidasaude.net/) is a healthcare small company that develops IT technology with the aim of improving the quality of life of patients with respiratory and allergic diseases by providing personalized healthcare services and solutions. MEDIDA develops, evaluates and delivers services ..
MEDIDA
MEDIDA (http://www.medidasaude.net/) is a healthcare small company that develops IT technology with the aim of improving the quality of life of patients with respiratory and allergic diseases by providing personalized healthcare services and solutions.
MEDIDA develops, evaluates and delivers services and products for patients with chronic diseases, especially for respiratory and allergic diseases. In 2007, the company activities started with the development of web-based educational contents for patients. The clients were the Portuguese Asthma Patients Association and BIAL (the biggest Portuguese Pharma company). In 2008 a collaboration agreement with AEROCRINE AB (a Swedish company, the leader in exhaled biomarkers technologies) was signed for the development of Web-based decision support system to help with the interpretation of exhaled nitric oxide (FENO), an inflammatory biomarker for asthma/respiratory diseases. The web-based FENO Decision Support Tool was an interactive web application designed to assist in interpreting FENO values at the point of care. The classifying values, the FENO cut off values, were created from algorithms based on a set of rules established from the literature. In 2011 Aerocrine AB made a decision to use fixed instead of personalized cut-values stopping the dissemination of the tool (a version of the tool is still available at feno.med.up.pt).
Since 2009 the clinical services provided at CUF Porto Hospital and Instituto have been the main activity of the company. MEDIDA is responsible for the respiratory physiology labs and allergy care services at these leading private healthcare providers. It has the collaboration of 8 doctors, 3 respiratory physiologists and one pharmacist. At this locations MEDIDA has been able to participate in clinical research projects 7 from pharmaceutical industry, 2 from academia and 3 lead by MEDIDA in collaboration with CINTESIS.
One of the most successful R&D and evaluation project of MEDIDA has been the development, evaluation and dissemination of two patient-reported outcomes (PRO) the CARAT (Control of Allergic Rhinitis and Asthma Test) and CARATkids (for children between 6 and 12 years old). MEDIDA holds the rights of these PRO and represents the authors. These PRO have been cultural-adapted for over 20 languages by local researchers, and projects using these PRO have been implemented in the Netherlands, Greece, Belgium, Germany, Brazil, and India. Commercial agreements with local offices of international companies have been signed in Netherlands (AstraZeneca), Belgium (Teva) and India (Scientimed).
In the last five years, the company has developed four mobile apps for patients (the most relevant is mCARAT available at the Android play store) and collaborated in the design or evaluation of four other mobile health projects (for asthma, rhinitis, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis). Currently, MEDIDA together with CINTESIS and BloomIdea (a digital businesses company from Braga, Portugal) is developing and will evaluate an app for improving the adherence to inhaled treatments using signal processing technology, gamification concepts, and peer-to-peer support. A licensing agreement for distribution has been signed with Mundipharma Portugal.
MEDIDA values high professional and academic qualifications of its collaborators. It was founded by 2 Ph.D. partners, one from Medicine and one from Engineering, and the long-term collaborators have (n=1) or are finishing their Ph.D. projects (n=3). The most recent collaborators one is completing their MSc in informatics engineering and the other is in pharmaceutical marketing and management.
Portugese Companies & Consortium
The Center for Health Technology and Services Research CINTESIS (http://cintesis.eu/en/home/ )is a non-profit research and development unit, recognized and supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT [UID/IC/4255/2013], with a classification of “Very Good”. It is currently hosted ..
FMUP - CINTESIS
The Center for Health Technology and Services Research (CINTESIS) is a non-profit research and development unit, recognized and supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (http://cintesis.eu/en/home/ ) (FCT) [UID/IC/4255/2013], with a classification of “Very Good”. It is currently hosted by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP), located in the recently inaugurated Medical Research Center (CIM) in Porto, Portugal (www.cintesis.eu). CINTESIS relies in a decentralized and flexible management structure involving about 400 researchers (of which 140 are integrated) and dry/wet labs of 6 higher education institutions (FMUP, ICBAS, UA, UAlg, UMa, ISEP, ESEP), organized into 4 thematic lines, i.e. TL1-Clinical and Health Services Research, TL2-Ageing and Neurosciences Research, TL3-Diagnosis, Disease and Therapeutics Research and TL4-Data and Methods Research, and 16 research groups, addressing various aspects from these 4 main research lines. CINTESIS has also partnerships with health units of Porto region (e.g. C. H. São João, IPO-Porto, CUF-Porto), with a very good track-record of recruitment of participants.
University of Porto (UPORTO, www.up.pt ) is Portugal’s second largest university and one of the most prestigious teaching and research institutions in the country. As the biggest producer of science in Portugal, with 14 faculties and one business school along with 16 libraries and 14 museums distributed over 3 campuses, UPORTO hosts over 50 research centers covering a wide range of areas, from the humanities to sciences and technologies, and 6 competence centers in the fields of cybersecurity, ageing, biomechanics, media, ocean and materials research. Assuming itself as a Research University, UPORTO is responsible for over 20% of the Portuguese scientific papers indexed each year in the ISI – Web of Science. In the last years, UPORTO has been putting large efforts in providing greater economic value to its scientific production and partnerships with industry leaders have already resulted in several innovations with proven success in the national and international sphere. University of Porto Science and Technology Park (UPTEC), European Commission’s REGIO STARS 2013 – Smart Growth Award winner, has been playing a very important role in this matter.
The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP) was established in 1911 and has been keeping for a long time a head position in medical education and biomedical research. FMUP is vastly renowned for its medical degree, teaching and research staff and type of research carried out. FMUP offers a medical degree, nine master degrees and ten PhD programs, which are entirely research-oriented. With its 19 academic departments and five R&D Units, which cover different areas of biomedical research, such as pharmacology, experimental morphology, health information systems and technologies, cardiovascular diseases and nephrology, FMUP shows its interdisciplinary nature. The spatial and strategic proximity to a central hospital of reference – C. H. São João – together with a strongly established basic research, enables a dynamic cross talk between basic and clinical sciences, leading to a forefront place in translation and clinical research.
Spanish Company
EXPERIS(https://www.experis.es/servicios-y-soluciones-it ) is a dedicated business unit of ManpowerGroup – a world leader in talent management services for more than 60 years, and a recognized pioneer in the industry. EXPERIS IT accelerates business growth and careers by intensely attracting ..
EXPERIS
EXPERIS (https://www.experis.es/servicios-y-soluciones-it ) is a dedicated business unit of ManpowerGroup – a world leader in talent management services for more than 60 years, and a recognized pioneer in the industry. EXPERIS IT accelerates business growth and careers by intensely attracting, assessing and placing specialized expertise offering advanced services based in talent. Aware of the increasing technological gap that the IT labour market has been experiencing for the last few years, EXPERIS IT strategy inside Media & Telco Division is based in the acquisition of edge technology capabilities which allow to train qualified professionals fitting the requirements of a market in continuous change. Furthermore, the Media & Telco division offers tailored SW solutions for large-scale corporations such as Alcatel Lucent, France Telecom, INDRA, Telefonica, etc. playing the role of technological provider within strategic and reliable projects. Thanks to those long-term technological partnerships, EXPERIS IT has enough presence for facing further initiatives of national and European scope in collaboration with other companies, SMEs and/or technological research centres. Thanks to those long-term technological partnerships, EXPERIS has enough presence for facing further initiatives of national and European scope in collaboration with other SMEs and/or technological research centres. Ever since its inception our company has been projected for participating actively into those Research and Development lines enabled by European Commission and national authorities. Such company strategy is favoured by the staff background by counting on more than 9 years of experience in international R&D within our managing areas.
Following technological fields are supported both by our staff expertise and, our ability and freshness to face new challenges offered by these technologies.
- Advanced network solutions and Interoperability: Most of the software projects where EXPERIS IT is involved are based on client-server architectures. Through the data optimization and multiprotocol translation, EXPERIS IT staff has succeeded in developing commercial solutions together with international enterprises. EXPERIS IT is involved in key Network Management Project with Spanish operators (Telefonica) EXPERIS IT can offer expertise in Cloud Computing architectures (i.e. old Grid oriented Globus Framework) and commercial solutions (i.e. Amazon Web Services – AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud…).
- Big data management: EXPERIS IT staff has been involved in the development and deployment of complex solutions where processing huge amount of data has been the final system core. This is as well the case of the Network Management solution EXPERIS IT has a real compromise with open source communities even within scenarios where reliability is one of the key aspects. That’s the reason to offer our expertise within database engines like MySQL and PostgreSQL both able to offer end-user solutions within realistic quality indicators and constraints. Nevertheless we are aimed to offer the most suitable solution for each customer and therefore, our expertise is wide open within database engine commercial solutions: Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle…EXPERIS IT staff has been involved in the deployment of technological solutions based on data base clustering hosting and manipulating millions of records. Those solutions were mainly based on MySQL engine NDBCluster. In the field of no-relational database management, EXPERIS IT staff has been involved in projects using geospatial data by deploying GIS platforms.
- IT Security and data protection: EXPERIS IT staff has an important expertise in the IT security field. Such expertise is focused into two main areas: the one oriented to secure communications among software entities: ssl layer development and configuration, data encryption, digital certificates management (x509 certificates and extensions), smart cards hardware integration,… and the one oriented to the users authentication/authorization and profiling through the deployment of Digital Identity Management standards such as: OpenID, Oasis (LibertyAlliance)… and their relation with Identity Providers (IdP) like Google or Facebook.
- High-End Server and Embedded Systems Deployment. EXPERIS IT staff understands the relevance of having the best technological ecosystem when the time comes for facing realistic software solutions. That’s the reason for considering the continuous training of our analysts into new technologies and solutions offered around the world.
EXPERIS has experience in the deployment of high-end server platforms based on robust software solutions such as JBoss where both open community and a proven reliability are joined in the same product. Of course, final platform decision depends on the global technological ecosystem so EXPERIS IT has expertise in other software server platforms such as: Oracle Weblogic Server, ASP .Net, Tomcat…
EXPERIS has been involved in the deployment of embedded systems where cost saving strategy is required for implementing a real solution. Within such scenarios, hardware consultancy is critical for reaching a tradeoff among costs and performance. EXPERIS IT has already been working with low resources hardware for embedded solutions such as those offered by Raspberry Pi® and Arduino (with ARM Cortex). - Low-level programming: EXPERIS IT has the required staff expertise for programming within several languages like: Java, Visual C++, Assembler, PHP, Python… Depending on the final solution needs and the technological context where it should be deployed, our company is able to involve those programmers with the required experience in the best suitable technology.
EXPERIS IT offers as partner the capacity for playing several roles from the “mere” developer of a piece of the global architecture to the main integrator or architectural responsible for the IT solution related to the project. - Staff R&D Experience: Concerning the Management of R&D project, our staff has been involved both as partners and coordinators of European proposals since FP 6 and therefore has the required expertise from the elaboration/negotiation phases till the execution and final review stages of a success initiative.
Turkish Companies & Consortium
ARD Group (https://www.ardgrup.com.tr/ ) based in 2011 specialises in cloud and mobile software development principally on Judicial Information Systems, Logistic Warehouse Systems as well as health software including Hospital Sterilization ..
ARD Grup
ARD Group (https://www.ardgrup.com.tr/ ) based in 2011 specialises in cloud and mobile software development principally on Judicial Information Systems, Logistic Warehouse Systems as well as health software including Hospital Sterilization Processes and Patient Tracking Technologies.
The company also has important accomplishments in Public Law and Security Sector in Turkey with the biggest private sector Judicial Network Project integrated with the National Judiciary Informatics System of Ministry of Justice, offering informatics services in a wide judicial spectrum from the Bar Associations to Police Departments, from Public Prosecution Offices to Courts.
Although relatively young, ARD GROUP is the proud developer of the Logistical Warehouses Automation, Communication and Information Infrastructure project for the Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Disaster & Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) enabling management and tracking of the inventory in 27 logistical warehouses throughout Turkey with RFID technology. Furthermore, ARD GRUP is the first Turkish Software Company to collaborate with 3M Infection Control Solutions and the developed software branded and sold by 3M Global offering complete management of sterilization process for hospitals of all sizes with full instrument tracking integration.
ARD GRUP’s project experiences include ICT Consultancy Services within the framework of European Union (IPA Funded) projects and multiple R&D projects with National funding through TUBITAK and KOSGEB.
Turkish Companies & Consortium
Established in 2007 with its academic roots, Mantis Software Company (http://www.mantis.com.tr/ ) adopts the principle of providing increasing added value to its customers and partners by investing on R&D for advanced technologies, innovative products ..
Mantis Software
Established in 2007 with its academic roots, Mantis Software Company adopts the principle of providing increasing added value to its customers and partners by investing on R&D for advanced technologies, innovative products, and services for the business solutions.
Alongside its expertise in search, information retrieval, data mining, and recognition, image processing, decision support systems, social media analysis, and analytics; Mantis has specialized in the areas of software development and technical consultancy. The company has also been expanding its range of services thanks to developing international- business partnerships.
Mantis aims to help to build a better world with relying on creative thinking, focusing on R&D and using state-of-the-art technology in inventive projects. In addition to this, its responsibilities do not relate merely to the monetary gains. The goal of contributing to social welfare and development is a part of our company ethics. All these specialties show the purpose of being a corporate citizen of Mantis.
Mantis proposed, coordinated and successfully completed many national projects with titles “Mantam, Mansad, Manses, and Mantoloji” and a Eurostars project titled “Sakuwassa” so far.
Pilots & Validation per Country
Pilots & Validation per Country
News & Events
Deliverable 3.1 - System Requirements Specification
The objective of this deliverable is to define, describe and compile all the functional and nonfunctional requirements that the coaching system needs to meet. These requirements were based on the Key Results, as defined in the FPP, and all the information extracted from WP1. Go Detail
Deliverable 3.2 - User Profile Modeling
Study of the current State-of-the-Art on existing user characteristics (which can be differentiated according to Domain Dependent Data and Domain Independent Data) and techniques to model different user profiles (which can be both statistical and non-statistical), and proposal of a common user model for the PHE. Go Detail
Deliverable D5.3a - Dissemination Report-1
This document is deliverable D5.3a from Personal Health Empowerment (PHE), “Dissemination”. This report describes the dissemination strategy and communication plan throughout the project’s lifespan (section 2 and 3) and presents the activities carried out so far (section 4). Go Detail
Deliverable D5.3b - Dissemination Report-2
This document is deliverable D5.3b from Personal Health Empowerment (PHE), Dissemination”.This report updates the communication plan, including changes in the dissemination strategy (section 2), list the activities carried out so far, and presents the activities done during 2019(section 3).Go Detail