BioAssist S.A. is an SME that provides innovative commercial services in the fields of mHealth and homecare, to enable the growing senior population to live independently and improve well-being. The company has developed and brought to market an integrated solution (https://heartaround.com) that enables the provision of independent assisted living and remote health monitoring services. The system incorporates a Personal Health Record (PHR) for its members and includes applications for all involved parties (patients, relatives, agents, doctors etc.), featuring state-of-the-art videoconferencing functionality, as well as wireless medical sensors for the patients. The platform also supports a two-stage helpdesk (primary and medical) for provision of user support and emergency management. The ‘HeartAround’ solution has been embraced by 3 University Hospitals, with ongoing pilot studies for the provision of enhanced care to chronic patients.
Through its participation in the CrowdHEALTH project, BioAssist aims to enhance its existing platform, embracing the HHR concept, in order to support, in addition to biosignals and medical information, data related to the social interaction, the habits and the activity level of its users. Furthermore, project outcomes with respect to health analytics will be exploited, aiming to interpret the different data sources into comprehensive and coherent knowledge for the identification of health risks and the optimization of medical treatment rules.
More specifically, BioAssist is leading the Chronic Disease Management Use Case of CrowdHEALTH,which will capitalize on the company’s ongoing piloting activities throughout Greece. Patients enrolled in BioAssist’s pilots have been provided with the ‘HeartAround’ app and wireless medical devices for measuring biosignals relevant to their condition (pulse oximeter, blood pressure meter, glucometer, spirometer, weighing scale, physical activity tracker). Patients perform biosignal measurements on a daily basis, following their doctors’ instructions. Measurements are automatically transmitted to the BioAssist platform and stored in the user’s PHR, which also includes information such as medical test results, medications and allergies, and is accessible to their attending doctor, enabling them to make well-informed decisions and offer personalized care to their patients. Anonymized data collected through the BioAssist platform will enrich CrowdHEALTH’s data sources with multiple and diverse types of information, covering both the clinical, the lifestyle and the social aspects of a patient’s status, thus contributing instrumentally in the implementation of the HHR concept.
The main objective of the Chronic Disease Management scenario within the project is to extend the existing monitoring solution with the CrowdHEALTH Platform’s capabilities, in order to create value-added services targeting both public health authorities and clinicians. Public health authorities will be able to deduce meaningful insights analyzing the collected data and empower potential policy makers in measuring the impact of relevant policies. At the same time, CrowdHEALTH’s outcomes will also be highly useful to clinicians caring for groups of chronic patients, enhancing the value and effectiveness of the provided analytics and forecasting services.