Connected Health

The EU directives towards "ICT for Health activities" address the "health management" continuum from lifestyle to disease management, including disease prevention and management of comorbidities. This will be complemented by the research in the computational modelling of human physiology paving the way for the next generation of healthcare services to enable patient empowerment and safer, more personalised care.

The health especially of elderly people, as well as people with chronic diseases is of particular importance for future societies. Such people need:

·         to be continuously monitored @home so as to prevent undesirable situations deriving from their diseases;

·         to be effectively treated on a permanent basis in accordance with their individualized needs and

·         to be psychologically supported through feeling autonomic and free.

All above should be realized in a cost-efficient manner for elderly people, relatives, medical centers and insurance companies. Although the underlying required technologies and SW and HW components are to a great extent available or at least possible to realise, end-to-end systems that can meet the requirements of pervasive secure and safe patient management services, are far from realization today. 
In this respect, the design and development of complex distributed systems for medical purposes present important challenges.

The Smarties group conducts research in the following areas:

(a)    design and development of advanced electronic healthcare applications

(b)   design and development of autonomic management systems ofr the provision of individualized services to patients @home

(c)    design, development, implementation and validation of end-to-end platforms for ubiquitous access to e-health services and applications

(d)   design and development of Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) appropriately structured per disease

(e)    design and development of tele-surgery systems

(f)    design and development of advanced patient monitoring through medical and non-medical sensors (e.g. in intelligent home environments)