CHIRON INTEGRATED HEALTHCARE APPROACH FOR HOME, MOBILE AND CLINICAL ENVIRONMENTS

Progress beyond the state-of-the art

The CHIRON project will provide a number of key results each demonstrating breakthrough innovation in its relevant technological field.

The technological challenges of this new Personal Health System fully integrated into the conventional hospital-based Healthcare System are in the realization of the best synergy among conflicting requirements:
Data gathering and data processing in resource-constrained systems (the wireless mobile sensors network),

Unobtrusiveness of the monitoring combined with accuracy of the measured data,
Continuous monitoring vs. unobtrusiveness of the solution and its acceptance by the patients,
Automation or minimal human intervention vs. the reliability of the feedback,
Availability of a massive quantity of data vs. the easy and fast interpretation of these data by the medical professional,
Privacy and security of data vs. easy and ubiquitous access to these data by authorized persons,
etc.

The advanced solution proposed by CHIRON represents a solid contribution to solve these issues.

The following table lists the research areas addressed by CHIRON and gives a brief summary on how CHIRON will progress beyond state-of-the art. Full details are described in the paragraphs following the table.

Table : Progress beyond state-of-the art at a glance

Topic	CHIRON contribution Beyond State-of-the Art
New approach in healthcare	Detection of deviations in the behaviors and construction of a personal, evolving risk assessment of the patient (“Alter Ego” concept); personalization of the system and adaptation to the changes; proactive computing anticipating the needs of the user and the changed context’s requirements; Integration of personal healthcare systems with the hospital workflow
ARCHITECTURE: 1) multiparametric monitoring	Network of Smart sensors with measurement accuracy of each indicator enhanced through the comparison with other monitored parameters; realization of an overall embedded system that measures simultaneously a number of simple parameters from easily applicable, low cost sensors, but that taken together form a powerful diagnostic tool.
1) Integration of heterogeneous devices / embedded systems	Design of an abstraction layer exposing a generic device profile to the application layer and providing a standard mechanism to access data and services of heterogeneous networked embedded devices independently from the hardware of the nodes and from the specific solution adopted at network and link layers.
1) flexibility	Allowing dynamic adaptation, composition and reconfiguration of components; realizing resources optimization and easy extensibility
NEW APPROACHES IN THE ELICITATION OF NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS	Extension of ISO 25000 standards to the Personal Healthcare domain and inclusion – in addition of the medical professionals only – of the final users (elderly, patients suffering from chronic diseases) in the elicitation process.
SENSOR NODES WITH ENHANCED CAPABILITIES	Distributed processing and distributed data storage at sensor node level; adoption of a heterogeneous energy harvesting system (use of state-of-the art energy harvesting techniques complemented with an effective power management strategy)
New methods for the measurement of biological parameters	Better accuracy in Blood pressure measurement through algorithms processing the ECG data; Use of the ECG for the measurement of blood serum potassium, Use of the ECG for the measurement of extracellular fluid accumulation, Advanced positioning techniques for tracking and tracing
DATA SECURITY AND PRIVACY	Novel solution for enhancing data security and privacy in the Wireless Sensor Network
ADVANCED SOLUTIONS FOR THE ANALYSIS AND THE VISUALIZATION OF MEDICAL IMAGES	Advanced post processing techniques to get quantitative information from medical images; Methods for automated features extraction and computer-aided detection of suspicious regions; Innovative solutions of high dynamic displays for enhanced visualization of the images.