Awareness Enabling new kind of mobile health services by realizing remote monitoring of health functions and treatment independent of time and place utilizing a mobile service infrastructure.

The aging problem and decreasing amount of health care personnel will increase the load for our health capacity in such a way that there is a high demand for developing new ways of health care delivery. The provision of health care at distance; replacement of health care delivery from specialized institutes towards the daily environment of patients using information and communication technology (ICT) is considered to be such an alternative. Using ICT relevant medical information can be captured in the patients own environment, transmitted, stored, and retrieved remotely by the care provider any time any place.

The Awareness project attempts to make a step forward into enabling this new kind of mobile health services by realizing remote monitoring of health functions and by demonstrating the feasibility of free health treatment concepts; meaning a treatment independent of time and place utilizing a mobile service infrastructure. A mobile context-aware health service platform has been developed enabling remote monitoring and treatment of patients with affected neuromuscular functions because of sudden and partly predictable sudden exacerbations. Besides biodata (such as EMG and accelerometer), context-information (bandwidth, location and presence) is acquired in order to enable more accurate medical decision making by care providers.

Within this project, Roessingh Research and Development is responsible for the development and validation of three applications; being remote seizure detection in epileptic seizures, remote treatment of chronic low back pain, and remote monitoring of spasticity. For example; for chronic pain the application focuses on continue recordings of activity and feedback on daily activities is provided multiple times during the day. This application is supported by a M-health service platform which enables the continuous bi-directional data stream between the patient and a healthcare professional. The platform consists of a personalized BAN for remote monitoring of activity pattern and a Mobile Base Unit (MBU). Data of the subject are sent to the MBU, which relays this data wirelessly (e.g. GPRS, UMTS, WiFi) to the M-Health Service Platform BackEnd server. This platform consists of software that is (partially) deployed on the MBU and (partially) on the secure BackEnd server. This generated the possibility for the health care professional to have essential health status data available independent of time and place.

The project runs from April 2004 -February 2008. Partners involved are: Alcatel Lucent (Bell Labs Europe), Telematica Institute, University of Twente (CTIT), WMC, Ericsson, Yucat, TMS-I and RRD.

For more information: http://awareness.freeband.nl

This project is being sponsored by:

the BSIK program of the Dutch Ministry of Economical Affairs (Senter)

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