Virtual Coaching Activities for Rehabilitation in Elderly (vCare)
To reduce the risk of a relapse of a serious acute illness in the old age an active reorientation of the lifestyle is often necessary, motivated through the affected person. An international research team investigates in the EU-funded project "vCare - Virtual Coaching Activities for Rehabilitation in Elderly" how a bespoke shift from a rehabilitation phase to the home environment can be realised by means of an intelligent linking of health information, details concerning the living environment and the continuous interaction with the affected persons.
background
One out of six people in the EU has a disability, usually caused by an acute episode or a chronic disease (i.e., heart disease, heart attack, stroke, Parkinson disease). Providing a suitable rehabilitation is the main issue for people, especially at advanced age, as it helps people to live independently and enhance their Quality of Life. Virtual Coaches can help these patients to proceed with a personalized rehabilitation that complies to age-related conditions, as the key technology for empowering patients through the enhancement of the adherence to the care plan and the risk prevention. The vCare project addresses two major shortcomings of the status quo: a participatory design driven by users’ needs and the personalization of care pathways enabled by technology. The results of vCare shall stimulate the European Healthcare & ICT sector for innovations in the field of integrated care. In sum, vCare will contribute to the EU goal to increase healthy life years of Europeans by two until 2020.
Objectives
- Development and validation of an ICT-based coaching system
- Personalized rehabilitation based on clinical pathways
- Context-awareness, adaption and personalisation mechanisms
- Multi-stakeholder approach involving a large number of actors
- Seamless integration of prior contributions
- Active patient-involvement in design, development and implementation
- Comprehensive evaluation strategy and development of four reference sites of the virtual coaching technology
- Promotion of digital transformation of the European healthcare sector
- Integration of FIWARE and universAAL as infrastructure technologies
work schedule & Concept
The duration of the action will be 48 months and will be subdivided into ten Work Packages (WP). Six WP focus on the technological implementation of the Virtual Coach, one WP on the clinical concept and piloting, one WP on the communication and dissemination, one WP on the project management, one WP on the ethical requirements.
WP 1: Clinical Concept and Piloting. Following a “user centric approach”, user acceptance in clinical trials and learning capabilities will be demonstrated. This will be achieved by a high involvement of a multidisciplinary clinical team.
WP 2: Context Integration. The design, development, and prototype implementation of the smart house open scalable sensor infrastructure that supports the Virtual Coaching services for the use cases are in focus.
WP 3: Design and Development of Recipient and Caregiver Interfaces. The recipient and the care giver system-user interaction of the virtual coaching platform will base on natural, human-like, avatar-based communication techniques. The patients’ progress and interactions lead to adaptively processed content. Caregivers can monitor and modify the rehabilitation.
WP 4: Knowledge Integration and Learning. A robust and expressive knowledge representation framework for the specification of the semantic baseline models and different ontologies (clinical pathway, treatment, patient profile, disease and environment) for the Virtual Coach will be developed.
WP 5: Coaching Services. This is about the integration and adoption of previously developed and validated coaching services and development of new services for the end-user. These will be used and integrated into the semantic architecture and enhanced with standardized interfaces.
WP 6: Pathway System. Semantically integrated care pathway services will be developed. These provide all necessary functionalities to create and manage care pathway templates, to execute the pathway, and to adapt the pathway by means of the reasoning service.
WP 7: Service platform backbone. This is about the design of a frictionless system architecture, the interfaces and composition mechanisms of its elements on a conceptual level. The semantic enriched services will allow a comparable level of service description and an easy exchange of the services.
WP 8: Project Management. A professional and permanent project management is crucial for a successful and effective execution and management of the project. This comprises of day-to-day administration, scientific co-ordination and monitoring of the project's progress.
WP 9: Communication and Exploitation. Diffusing information and raising overarching awareness about project’s ambitions, interest in the scientific community to prepare the clinical, economical and societal assessment of the project results and to enable the use of the project results and their exploitation.
Project ConsorTium
TUD. TU Dresden, Chair of Wirtschaftsinformatik, esp. Systems Development, Dresden, Germany; FZI. Forschungszentrum Informatik am Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Karlsruhe, Germany; CCP. Casa di Cura Privata del Policlinico Spa, Milan, Italy; IMA. Imaginary SRL, Milan, Italy; AIT. Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Vienna, Austria; MYS. TSB Real Time Location Systems SL, Valencia, Spain; OSA. Servicio Vasco de Salud Osakidetza, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; SIV. Siveco Romania SA, Bucarest, Romania; UMFCD. Universitatea de Medicina si Farmacie “Carol DaVila” din Bucuresti, Bucarest, Romania; AU. Aarhus Universitet, Aarhus, Denmark; iSprint. Innovation Sprint, Brussels, Belgium; EHTEL. European Health Telematics Association, Brussels, Belgium.
