2007

MyHealthService - personal healthcare technology and services for elderly chronically ill

In the project MyHealthStation in 2005, NST, Well, UNN and Norut designed and developed a prototype of a system for home based training, self-management and following-up of patients/chronically ill over broadband networks.

Background

It supports interaction between patient and healthcare personnel and is available to the patient using his/her TV and remote control. The research group produced educational videos, designed and implemented health services, supported medical sensors, developed and tested the system in a field trial with two patient groups, and evaluated the technology and services with regard to user experiences. The results from MyHealthStation were very promising and have lead to several new follow-up projects.

Goal

• Easy-to-use integrated personal healthcare technology.
• Services for elderly chronically ill patients.

Problems

Overall research tasks include providing personal healthcare technology and services that are easy-to-use and available both in-house and while mobile and on the move, tailored to the user’s needs and abilities.  The services will be non-intrusive and integrated in the user’s environment. Personal monitoring technology and services will be developed where data sensing, reasoning and user-feedback are provided in a seamless fashion.

Suggested PhD projects

• Seamless, personal and trustworthy data management (acquisition, storage, reasoning, and retrieval) on residential and mobile eHealth service platforms.
• Adaptive and context sensitive user interfaces for residential and mobile eHealth service platforms. The focus will be on accessibility and design-for-all.

Methods

We will have an experimental approach, develop prototype technology and services, and evaluate them through experiments in controlled environments or in empirical studies of actual use. Observation and interviews will be applied in several phases of the research; during the requirement phase, in service design, during experiments, and in the validation of the experiments. Scenarios techniques may be applied in the user-centered design phase, and effect-studies when validating the experiments.
 
We will develop systems based on open standards, and whenever possible both use and develop open source software components. Privacy and security issues are vital in trust-worthy personal healthcare and will be an integral component in our work.  Our research will be user-centered and the citizen (the elderly) will be involved in the process of developing the new personal health services.  We will involve clinicians and other healthcare personnel in our research and lay the ground for clinical validation of technology and services.

Project manager

Tatjana M .Burkow (NST) 

Project partners

 

  • NST,
  • UNN HF,
  • Norwegian Health Net,
  • Norut

Project participants

 

  • Njål T. Borch (Norut),
  • Astrid Bratvold (UNN),
  • Tatjana M. Burkow (NST),
  • Juan Manual Cruz (Norut),
  • Eva Henriksen (NST),
  • Elin Johnsen (NST), 
  • Randi Karlsen (Norut / UiTø),
  • Trine Krogstad (NST),
  • Luis Fernandez Luque (PhD student Norut),
  • Marijke Risberg (UNN) and
  • Lars K. Vognild (Norut).

International collaboration

We will have collaboration with partners from Denmark, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Wales in an eTen project to be started in 2007. In addition we are involved in several consortia’s writing proposals for European funding.

Project start/stop

January 2007 - end of 2011

Contribution to health care

With our technology it will be possible to let chronic patients stay at home and to have easier access to healthcare professionals, and let healthcare professionals reach their patients and provide help and following-up as needed. Through the development of technologies and services and involving patients and healthcare personnel in the process, we believe the healthcare providers will adopt technologies and implement new health services at an earlier stage than other vice.

Contribution to new industry

We believe that personal healthcare technologies that are easy to use and able to interact seamlessly with the healthcare providers will have a large commercial marked in the years to come.

Other

Characteristics of our work is chronically ill elderly, personalized health services and user control, rich and integrated healthcare services, non-intrusive technology and easy-to-use services, user-centered development and citizen involvement, open standards and software, and strive towards clinical validation.

Project manager

Tatjana M. Burkow, e-mail: Tatjana Burkow, mobile phone: +47 957 29 041

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