Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the deadliest among chronic diseases, and with more people surviving their first cardiac event, CVD is becoming a chronic disease. It is estimated that they are responsible for 12 million disability adjusted life years lost annually¹ and that nearly half of all deaths in Europe (48%) and in the EU (42%) are due to CVD. It is the main cause of the disease burden (illness and death) in Europe (23%). There is a multitude of aetiologies for CVD such as ischemic heart disease, hypertension, valvular heart disease, infection and other primary and secondary myocardial diseases¹. CVD has a major impact on health expenditure. Overall CVD is estimated to cost the EU27 €192 billion distributed between €109 billion of direct costs (10% of the EU expenditure) and about €83 billion in indirect costs (€41 billion of lost in productivity and €42 billion for informal care).
In order to handle the challenges induced by the chronic disease burden, the EU health systems are undergoing a paradigm shift from reactive care to preventive care and from in-hospital to home care. Prevention systems support and motivate users in adopting healthy lifestyles (e.g., physical activity, nutrition, stress management) in order to prevent or delay manifestations of disabling chronic diseases. Disease management systems handle the care of patients with chronic disease, combining expertise from different areas, and integrating new technologies to offer the patient better and more cost effective care. In this context, personalizing health and care (PHC) systems have a central role in supporting the paradigm shift by assisting in the provision of continuous and personalised services to empower patients and professionals in managing their health. Although in the last decade there has been an intense and significant research on developing and deploying PHC services in CVD management (up to 50% of the PHC market products and 40% of research projects are related to CVD management²), there are still some major gaps that need to be addressed².
In order to handle the challenges induced by the chronic disease burden, the EU health systems are undergoing a paradigm shift from reactive care to preventive care and from in-hospital to home care. Prevention systems support and motivate users in adopting healthy lifestyles (e.g., physical activity, nutrition, stress management) in order to prevent or delay manifestations of disabling chronic diseases. Disease management systems handle the care of patients with chronic disease, combining expertise from different areas, and integrating new technologies to offer the patient better and more cost effective care. In this context, personalizing health and care (PHC) systems have a central role in supporting the paradigm shift by assisting in the provision of continuous and personalised services to empower patients and professionals in managing their health. Although in the last decade there has been an intense and significant research on developing and deploying PHC services in CVD management (up to 50% of the PHC market products and 40% of research projects are related to CVD management²), there are still some major gaps that need to be addressed².
Today’s PHC systems miss adequate integration of clinical evidence and knowledge from holistic clinical practice and biomedical research required to support truly holistic management of chronic diseases and their co-morbidities. Current PHC systems are designed using the “one fits all” principal lacking a truly personalization by capturing and adapting to the patients’ phenotype (e.g., by linking systems medicine and the virtual physiological patient to tele-monitoring data) and individualized treatment or context needs. Data processing is at the core of PHS where acquired data is turned into meaning and action. In order to pave the way from personal to personalised systems, PHC require intelligent algorithms to treat and correct data obtained from uncontrolled conditions, to efficiently integrate multimodal and multi-scale data, to be self-adapting (moving from population-based to patient-specific adaptations) and interpretable, and to integrate clinical and biomedical evidence at their genesis.
In this project our goal is to link competences in intelligent processing in order to create a research ecosystem to address two central scientific and technical challenges for PHC deployment: (1) infusion of clinical evidence biomedical knowledge in PHC solutions and (2) moving PHC solutions from personal to personalized services, i.e., services adapted to the specific user needs and characteristics. This will foster EU impact and leadership in intelligent processing for CVD management in PHC, led from Coimbra, Valencia and Milan.
In this project our goal is to link competences in intelligent processing in order to create a research ecosystem to address two central scientific and technical challenges for PHC deployment: (1) infusion of clinical evidence biomedical knowledge in PHC solutions and (2) moving PHC solutions from personal to personalized services, i.e., services adapted to the specific user needs and characteristics. This will foster EU impact and leadership in intelligent processing for CVD management in PHC, led from Coimbra, Valencia and Milan.
¹ Steven Allender, Peter Scarborough, Viv Peto and Mike Rayner, European Heart Disease Statistics, 2008 Ed., Health Economics Research Centre, Department of Public Health, University of Oxford.
² Cristiano Codagnone, Reconstructing the Whole: Present and Future of Personal Health Systems, PHS 2020, 2009.