Digital Health
Digital Health for Person-Activated Health and Wellbeing
Technological innovations are accelerating disruption in consumer health and wellbeing.
Some innovative trends in the healthcare industry look at the concept of preventive and personalized care, with an increasing number of sector stakeholders aiming to deliver this through smart technology and client-centred solutions.
CHALLENGES
There is a disconnect between the current healthcare systems, that is still predominantly focused on disease management, and the needs of empowered consumers whose main focus is on their health and wellness.
In fact, current health systems primarily focus on managing illness and disease, using prescribed care pathways, rather than dealing with individual health and wellness where care pathways are adapted and personalized to person’s health, wellness and quality of life goals.
Moreover, the majority of digital tools and online platforms work as silos and do not help consumers to understand their conditions, make informed choices with healthcare professionals, and self-manage their daily life.
SUGGESTED SOLUTION
Person-activated health and wellbeing allows individual and population to meet requirements, values, and personalized health goals. It is based on three fundamental components:
- Patient empowerment and its three basic steps, i.e., understand, making informed decisions and self-managing health/conditions;
- An integrated communication model that allows communication/interaction in the health system to cooperate and to work in the same way independently of the interlocutors;
- An ecosystem of apps with an ever increasing number of industry stakeholders that aims to deliver preventive and personalized care through smart technology.
RESEARCH FOCUS
Creation of a context-aware intelligent health system for person-activated health and wellbeing by using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Augmented Reality (AR) / Virtual Reality (VR). It is made by the following components:
- An integrated communication model that is tailored (to information requirements of interlocutors), aligned (in terms of communication levels), and coordinated (with other communication processes);
- An ecosystem of apps that helps people to comprehend, make informed decisions and self manage health and wellbeing, and coordinates and aligns communication inside healthcare system.
- An intelligent health-empower agent that monitors health (through IoMT), understands person health needs and empowerment level, selects and configures apps and services for comprehension, informed decision and self-management of health and wellbeing, and connects with relevant healthcare parties for seamless communication.
Objective:
Creation of an integrated communication model for tailored, aligned, and coordinated communication inside healthcare.
Integrated communication model that is:
- Tailored to information requirements of interlocutors;
- Aligned in terms of communication levels;
- Coordinated with other communication processes.
Barriers:
Communication/interaction issues inside healthcare system due to heterogeneity of interlocutors (humans or machines) and different knowledge levels.
Challenges:
There is a need of a homogeneous communication model among the various healthcare parties (e.g. patient-doctor-web).
Objective:
Creation of an ecosystem of apps that facilitates person-activated health (understand, decide, act) and complies with the integrated communication model.
Value Proposition:
Ecosystem of apps that:
helps people to comprehend, make informed decisions and self manage health and wellbeing;
coordinates and aligns communication inside healthcare system in relation to person health objectives.
Barriers:
Existing health apps/services in the market work as silos and are difficult to be chosen/used by non-skilled people.
Challenges:
People/patients should be empowered to understand, make informed decisions and self-manage their health and wellbeing.
Objective:
Creation of context-aware intelligent health-empower agent by using AI, RPA and AR/VR.
Intelligent health-empower agent that:
Monitors health (through IoMT);
Understands person health needs and empowerment level;
Selects and configure apps and services for person management of health and wellbeing;
Connects with relevant healthcare parties for seamless communication.
Barriers:
People/patients do not understand medical info and do not play an active role in making choices and managing health and wellbeing.
Challenges:
An intelligent help to select/customize apps for patient empowerment and communication with healthcare parties is needed.
- Monitor health (through IoMT);
- Understand person health needs and empowerment level;
- Select and configure apps and services for comprehension, informed decision and self-management of health and wellbeing;
- Connect with relevant healthcare parties for seamless communication.
Collaboration Opportunities
Analysis of current trends on person-activated health and wellbeing
An analysis of current trends on person-enabled health and wellbeing will be executed on the following topics:
- Communication processes inside the healthcare system starting from person-doctor-web communication;
- Patient Empowerment; and
- Digital tools for health literacy, self-diagnosing and care self-management.
Creation of an integrated communication model for tailored, aligned, and coordinated communication inside a healthcare system
Creation of an integrated communication model for tailored, aligned, and coordinated communication inside a healthcare system.
To this end, the characteristics of the communication processes, occurring in the different healthcare contexts, will be analysed in terms of components, interactions, requirements, outcomes, indicators, etc.
An integrated communication model will be built by establishing the optimal mapping between these characteristics and both the communication models developed in the different scientific fields and the results of focus groups executed with patients and medical professionals.
Creation of an ecosystem of digital apps for patient empowerment
Creation of an ecosystem of digital apps (search, translate, learn, assess, talk, assist, …) that facilitate person-enabled health (understand, decide, act) and comply with the integrated communication model.
The design-development-evaluation-learn phases of the model will proceed through agile development cycles (with at least three cycles) so that the obtained results in a cycle can be used as input in the next cycle.
Creation of a context-aware intelligent health-empower agent for person-activated health and wellbeing
Creation of context-aware intelligent health-empower agent by using AI, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and VR/AR that:
- Monitors health (through IoMT);
- Understands person health needs and empowerment level;
- Selects and configure (from app store) apps and services;
- Provides custom services and connects with relevant healthcare parties for seamless communication.
Researchers:
List of Publications:
General Public Articles
M. Alfano, How the internet can help us to stay healthy.RTE Brainstorm. 4 October 2019.
Scientific Publications
- M. Alfano, B. Lenzitti, D. Taibi and M. Helfert. (2020) Language Complexity in On-line Health Information Retrieval.. In: Ziefle M., Maciaszek L. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health. ICT4AWE 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1219. Springer, Cham
- M. Alfano, B. Lenzitti, G. Lo Bosco, C. Muriana, T. Piazza, G. Vizzini. (2020) Design, Development and Validation of a System for Automatic Help to Medical Text Understanding. International Journal of Medical Informatics, Vol. 138, pp. 104109. Elsevier BV.
- M. Alfano, B. Lenzitti, D. Taibi and M. Helfert (2020). Tailored Retrieval of Health Information from the Web for Facilitating Communication and Empowerment of Elderly People.In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health – Volume 1: ICT4AWE, ISBN 978-989-758-420-6, pages 205-216. DOI: 10.5220/0009576202050216.
- M. Alfano, B. Lenzitti, D. Taibi, M. Helfert. (2019) ULearn: Personalized Medical Learning on the Web for Patient Empowerment. In: Herzog M., Kubincová Z., Han P., Temperini M. (eds) Advances in Web-Based Learning – ICWL 2019. ICWL 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11841. Springer, Cham.
- S. Togneri MacMahon, M. Alfano, B. Lenzitti, G. Lo Bosco, F. McCaffery, D. Taibi, and M. Helfert. (2019) Improving Communication in Risk Management of Health Information Technology Systems by means of Medical Text Simplification. Proc. of 4th IEEE Workshop on ICT Solutions for e-Health (ICTS4eHealth 2019), 30 June 2019, Barcelona.
- M. Alfano, B. Lenzitti, D. Taibi and M. Helfert. (2019) Provision of Tailored Health Information for Patient Empowerment: An Initial Study. Proc. of ACM International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies (CompSysTech’19), 21-22 June 2019, Ruse.
- M. Alfano, B. Lenzitti, D. Taibi, M. Helfert. (2019) Facilitating access to health web pages with different language complexity levels. Proc. of the 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health (ICT4AWE 2019), 2-4 May 2019, Heraklion-Crete.
