The current costs of healthcare and, in addition, the trend of
increasing costs due to the aging society, is an important issue in the
Western World. This puts the current healthcare systems in the spotlight
of governments and one concludes that we cannot continue in the current
track. Aspects to take account in this respect are:
- The cost of healthcare as proportion of the GDP must be reduced.
This can be achieved by increasing the efficiency within healthcare
organisations e.g.: to reduce the number of “days in a hospital” and
reduce costly treatment programmes and the number of face-to-face
consultations. Another way is prevention by detecting people at risk
in an early phase and provide guidance to prevent costly
hospitalisation. Repeated hospitalisation for the chronically ill
could also be reduced. It is also important to motivate people to
maintain a healthy lifestyle. People are also feeling increasingly
responsible for their health.
- Increase the quality of healthcare by error reduction and better
communication. Provide access to the right information for all care
providers concerned with a patient.
- Improve in general the ‘quality of life’ experienced by EU
citizens. Reduce the impact of treatment by enabling patients to
rehabilitate at home with proper guidance. Enable elderly and
disabled people to live as long as possible in their own social
environment.
We believe that digital Information and Communication Technologies
can contribute towards solutions for person centric wearable and
stationary appliances as well as end-to-end services operated by care
providers.
An important observation is that the healthcare sector in general, as
stated in the US but not that different in Europe, is lagging behind in
applying state of the art ICT technology compared to other sectors in
our societies. Possible reasons for this are:
- Reluctance to change processes and procedures, as well as
re-allocating roles between existing or new care providers
- Hard to change complex structures with a large degree of
independence
- Conflicts with regulations and legislation
Another important issue relates to business models. Who will take
care of the costs of these systems and who is going to pay for them? The
area of payers varies from consumers/patients, employers and insurance
companies who pay for sick leave, or government.
The goal of NUADU** is to explore the opportunities for providing
‘healthcare and wellness’ services and applications that facilitate more
cost effective and efficient solutions. Interesting approaches to create
opportunities are:
The scope of the
applications to be investigated will vary across the usage categories
shown in the diagram below and will include all age categories.
Apart from supporting the consumer/patient, support should be
provided for other users within these application domains such as
doctors, nurses at care centres, home visiting nurses, home care
personnel, informal care providers, dieticians, trainers, coaches,
etc.
The applications might vary from stand-alone on-body systems with
direct feedback to the user, to distributed systems that consist of
sensor networks, personal or home hubs, and clusters of back-end
services. To enable the development of such applications an
end-to-end infrastructure, communication networks and protocols, and
application level protocols need to be developed with particular
attention focussed on the constraints posed by the medical related
applications.
The results of the project will target mid term (<3 year) solutions
as well as longer-term solutions (5-8 year time frame). The emphasis
will be on demonstrating solutions for the mid term time frame and
documenting possible approaches for the long term. The long term
will be supported by experiments on well-defined but probably
isolated topics. Whenever possible the results should contribute to
the development of standards at a general level and, in particular,
standards for the health care domain taking the specific medical
constraints into account.
