CARE-U: An integrative and ubiquitous healthcare environment for self-management of chronic disease

The sustainable resource management of public health systems is threatened by a number of factors, among them the ongoing population ageing and the ensuing increased prevalence of chronic conditions, opening a debate about the need for new models of care. Self-management appears as a new care paradigm where patients are taught how to carry out the activities of daily living optimally in the face of their physiological impairment and to decrease the severity of their disease by means of life style adaptation.

The main aim of this project is the design and development of CARE-U, an integrative environment for the development, validation, assessment, evaluation and deployment of a new generation of ubiquitous health services enhancing the prominence of patients in managing their chronic disease under the self-management paradigm. The proposed environment will be based on a previous open architecture being implemented on smart mobile consumer electronics.

The specific goals of the project are the following:

1. To propose, design and develop a new temporal framework based on abductive reasoning for biosignal interpretation.
2. To propose, design and develop a new collaborative editing tool for care plans with support for gamification strategies.
3. To propose, design and develop new mining procedures oriented to exception discovery in temporal data mining to be integrated in the CARE-U platform.
4. To design and develop the platform that will include all the features and functionalities required for achieving the goals of the project.
5. To make the evaluation of the platform in a home care self-management program.
6. To establish mechanisms and protocols for keeping patients privacy protected, and to identify and analyse ethical and legal implications of deploying CARE-U platform.