A health telemonitoring platform based on data integration from different sources
This addresses the problem of unsustainable healthcare resource use for chronic disease management, but it is incremental as it builds on existing telemonitoring and data integration technologies.
The paper tackles the challenge of managing chronic illnesses by implementing a telemonitoring platform that integrates data from various devices to provide real-time health parameter monitoring, with preliminary usability tests indicating good user satisfaction.
The management of people with long-term or chronic illness is one of the biggest challenges for national health systems. In fact, these diseases are among the leading causes of hospitalization, especially for the elderly, and huge amount of resources required to monitor them leads to problems with sustainability of the healthcare systems. The increasing diffusion of portable devices and new connectivity technologies allows the implementation of telemonitoring system capable of providing support to health care providers and lighten the burden on hospitals and clinics. In this paper, we present the implementation of a telemonitoring platform for healthcare, designed to capture several types of physiological health parameters from different consumer mobile and custom devices. Consumer medical devices can be integrated into the platform via the Google Fit ecosystem that supports hundreds of devices, while custom devices can directly interact with the platform with standard communication protocols. The platform is designed to process the acquired data using machine learning algorithms, and to provide patients and physicians the physiological health parameters with a user-friendly, comprehensive, and easy to understand dashboard which monitors the parameters through time. Preliminary usability tests show a good user satisfaction in terms of functionality and usefulness.