The eHealthMonitor project

The eHealthMonitor project provides a service-oriented platform used in the process of generating a Personal eHealth Knowledge Space (PeKS) as an aggregation of all knowledge sources relevant for the provision of individualized personal eHealth services. The platform supports end users in two hospital-based scenarios – covering dementia and cardio-vascular domain as well as one prevention-based scenario in the health insurance domain.

Project Objectives.

The European society is characterised by high costs for its health system and a shrinking work force due to health reasons and an aging population. These aspects put an enormous pressure on the economy and the social system. Personal lifestyle and environmental impact factors are the most significant risk factors influencing health status. The fragmentation of knowledge about personal risk factors hinders the assessment of disease risks. In order to decide on preventive or therapeutic actions, physicians are required to obtain all relevant user-individual knowledge. Relevant knowledge sources include health records, patient records, databases on environmental information, wearable or portable devices for health monitoring, and common ubiquitous internet services (including user generated information).

We study this problem from the perspective of knowledge-based coordination. The rationale is making service network structures partly transparent to decision makers (i.e., medical professionals and users) and provide them with means for flexible configuration. For example, user-generated policies enable control of personal health data utilization for service provision. The main goal of the eHealthMonitor project is to provide a platform that generates a Personal eHealth Knowledge Space (PeKS) as an aggregation of all knowledge sources (e.g., EHR and PHR) relevant for the provision of individual personal eHealth services. The main goal is addressed by following objectives:

• Development of a platform for individualized personal healthcare services
• Acquisition of distributed knowledge from heterogeneous sources providing ability to respond to rapidly evolving conditions
• Design distributed knowledge sharing methods which consider privacy protection requirements
• Develop eHealth services supporting cooperation of all stakeholders in the decision making process.
• Evaluate the results both in the hospital/treatment and prevention scenarios

Project Description

eHealthMonitor's vision is to significantly increase the individualization of personal eHealth services and thereby the quality and patients' acceptance of electronic healthcare services for treatment and prevention. In order to support this eHealthMonitor will:

• Develop adaptive, sustainable platform architecture for individualized personal electronic healthcare services based on a pluggable open architecture framework for non ICT-skilled end users for an on-demand eHealth service provision through web, mobile and remote access channels.
• Develop reasoning, model evolution, and model summarization methods based on semantic models with different degrees of granularity, specificity, and different types of heterogeneity (syntactic, lexical, semantic) for acquiring and accessing distributed knowledge from existing data sources as an interoperable knowledge hub for a pro-active personalised health information management.
• Develop distributed, adaptive knowledge sharing coordination methods which consider privacy protection requirements with tools for manual and semi-automatic sharing of knowledge.
• Develop personal eHealth services that support cooperation and decision making of the involved participants (patients, clinicians, social services)

Evaluation of eHealthMonitor's platform will concern: (1) a technical evaluation and (2) a case study-based evaluation in three scenarios. The technical evaluation includes an evaluation of functionality, performance, and scalability on the component level. For the case studies, the platform is deployed in two hospital scenarios built around two of the most relevant issues in the current EU eHealth environment – dementia and cardiovascular diseases – involving patients and medical professionals. The third scenario comprises the deployment of the eHealthMonitor platform as part of prevention strategies where an insurance company provides its clients (patients and non-patients) access to the eHealthMonitor services in order to lower the risk of potential diseases.

Expected Results & Impacts

Achievement of the eHealthMonitor goal to enable generation of Personal eHealth Knowledge Spaces using distributed knolwedg sources will:

• significantly advances the individualization and thereby the patients' acceptance of electronic healthcare services for treatment and prevention;
• increases the ability to exploit very large knowledge spaces for individuals and professionals. In the eHealth domain;
• unfold and utilize hidden and known interrelations and dependencies between independently developed datasets (PHR, EHR, portable sensor systems, available environmental information) under consideration of security and privacy protection and epidemiological states;
• develop an adaptive, sustainable platform for electronic healthcare services increasing the computer-based diagnosis standard for medical decision support services.

Result Validation

The eHealthMonitor platform and health services are evaluated in three case studies: Deployment of the platform in two hospital scenarios built around two of the most relevant issues in the current EU eHealth environment – (1) dementia and (2) cardiovascular diseases – involving patients and medical professionals. (3) Deployment of the eHealthMonitor platform as part of prevention strategies where an insurance company provides its clients (patients and non-patients) access to the eHealthMonitor services in order to lower the risk of potential diseases.