Design and Development of a Heterogeneous Active Assisted Living Solution for Monitoring and Following Up with Chronic Heart Failure Patients in Spain.

Heart failure is the most common disease among elderly people, and the risk increases with age. The use of smart Internet of Things (IoT) systems for monitoring patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) in a non-intrusive manner can result in better control of the disease, improving proactive healthcare through real-time and historical patient's data, promoting self-care in patients, reducing unneeded interaction between patients and doctors, reducing the number of hospitalizations and saving healthcare costs. This work presents an active assisted living (AAL) solution based on the IoT to provide a tele-assistance platform for CHF patients from the public health service of the region of Murcia in Spain, with formal and informal caregivers and health professionals also as key actors. In this article, we have detailed the methodology, results, and conclusions of the prevalidation phase for the set of IoT technologies to be integrated in the AAL platform, the first mandatory step before the deployment of a large-scale pilot that will lead to improving the innovation of the system from its current technology readiness level to the market. The work presented, in the framework of the H2020 Pharaon project, aims to serve as inspiration to the R&D community for the design, development, and deployment of AAL solutions based on heterogeneous IoT technologies, or similar approaches, for smart healthcare solutions in real healthcare institutions.

Enabling Heart Self-Monitoring for All and for AAL-Portable Device within a Complete Telemedicine System.

During the last decades there has been a rapidly growing elderly population and the number of patients with chronic heart-related diseases has exploded. Many of them (such as those with congestive heart failure or some types of arrhythmias) require close medical supervision, thus imposing a big burden on healthcare costs in most western economies. Specifically, continuous or frequent Arterial Blood Pressure (ABP) and electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring are important tools in the follow-up of many of these patients. In this work, we present a novel remote non-ambulatory and clinically validated heart self-monitoring system, which allows ABP and ECG monitoring to effectively identify clinically relevant arrhythmias. The system integrates digital transmission of the ECG and tensiometer measurements, within a patient-comfortable support, easy to recharge and with a multi-function software, all of them aiming to adapt for elderly people. The main novelty is that both physiological variables (ABP and ECG) are simultaneously measured in an ambulatory environment, which to our best knowledge is not readily available in the clinical market. Different processing techniques were implemented to analyze the heart rhythm, including pause detection, rhythm alterations and atrial fibrillation, hence allowing early detection of these diseases. Our results achieved clinical quality both for in-lab hardware testing and for ambulatory scenario validations. The proposed active assisted living (AAL) Sensor-based system is an end-to-end multidisciplinary system, fully connected to a platform and tested by the clinical team from beginning to end.