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Personalized Health Informatics Technology in Development

EKG (Photos8.com)

(Photos8.com)

A team of European and Israeli researchers is developing technology for real-time, personalized health monitoring that can minimize the number of follow-up visits patients need to make to health care providers. The EU has granted about €6 million ($US8.1 million) over four years to fund the project.

The MOBIGUIDE project will involve researchers from five countries: Israel, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, and Spain. The project aims to help patients who need monitoring to lead normal lives while receiving continuous health tracking and decision support based on indicators of their condition, such as glucose level, heart rate, and blood pressure.

The system will first be implemented in Italy to track patients suffering from abnormal heart rate, and in Spain to monitor patients suffering with pregnancy complications, such as diabetes or  elevated blood pressure. The patients’ medical data will be automatically collected with portable devices, using a technology developed by research collaborators in the Netherlands. Health recommendations will be sent to the patients’ mobile phones or could be accessed over the Internet by the patients’ or doctors’ personal computers.

The system will be supported by the patients’ mobile devices and cloud-based technology. Patient data will be analyzed in real time, and treatment recommendations sent to patients and their doctors, using a technology infrastructure that has been developed by Yuval Shahar and colleagues from the Medical Informatics Research Center at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

The tools from the Medical Informatics Research Center include computerized representations of medical knowledge, analytical tools for interpretation of medical knowledge for patients with chronic illnesses, and medical decision support or clinical research tools. MOBIGUIDE’S core functions will also include links to European medical databases and intelligent real-time monitoring methods.

The system will enable patients to receive personalized medical advice based on several factors, such as family size, socioeconomic status, and physical location (e.g., at home or traveling). Technology developed by University of Haifa’s Mor Peleg and collaborators in Europe will gather these data and tailor the advice to the individual’s personal characteristics. While an individual’s personal medical data will be integrated from hospital medical records, monitoring devices, or decision-support systems will belong to the patients, not the institutions that generated the data.

Ben-Gurion University recently established a spin-off company, Medilogos Co., to implement the advanced data analysis systems and technologies for computer-assisted monitoring and treatment for patients with chronic illnesses.

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