The amount of elderly in the Netherlands is increasing. This involves an increase of people with chronic diseases. In the future, the capacity of our current health care system will be insufficient to treat all these people in face to face contacts. This means that more new and efficient treatment modalities should be developed. One of these new treatment concepts is the ambulatory activity-feedback based teletreatment (AAFTEL) service. This treatment is developed to be able to treat patients outside the rehabilitation setting and to make the treatment more individually tailored. This way, patients are not bound to treatment hours of the health care professional (increase of intensity of treatment) and travelling and waiting times will be decreased. This makes the patient more responsible for his own recovery. 

Various projects, financed by ZONMW and Pijn Innovatie Centrum het Roessingh, are currently performed to investigate the surplus value of the AAFTEL service in the daily environment of the patient. The AAFTEL service focuses on the daily activities of patients and consists of a monitoring and a feedback part. Patients carry a Body Area Network (BAN) consisting of a movement sensor (tri-axial accelerometer) and a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) (see figure 1). During the monitoring part, patients are monitored for several days in their own environment which enables the health care professional to establish a baseline daily activity pattern for each patient individually. During the feedback part, patients are instructed to deploy the same activity pattern as a norm value and supported in this by visual feedback on a PDA and time-related personalized feedback tips at fixed time moments.

Figure 1) Health body area network of the patient

Through this frequent feedback the patient is taught to find a balance between rest and activity. The feedback of a health care professional assists the patient in changing his activity pattern in an adequate way.

Project partners involved are: ‘Het Roessingh’ Center for rehabilitation, University of Twente (Faculty of Behavioural Sciences) and RRD

This project is being sponsored by:

ZonMw	Innovatiecentrum Pijnrevalidatie

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