eHealth for Citizens

This project constitutes a technological response to the challenges posed by the evolution of health care, as the sector faces a major demographic shift. An ageing population combined with an increase in chronic illnesses is changing the way health care is provided. Add to this a shortage of medical specialists, and the need to find new solutions to address health care issues becomes even more pressing. Our eHealth for Citizens project is mainly aimed at designing and implementing a technological service-oriented platform capable of devising and supporting innovative eHealth services.

An important project objective is to enable, enhance and support technological evolution to allow patients to be cared for in their homes. The focus is on creating customized services to meet the health care needs of patients, such as monitoring services. The platform will offer a wonderful opportunity for achieving better quality medical care, while bringing new added value services to the eHealth marketplace.

The project addresses various research topics:

• Development of a multi-modal Graphical User Interface (GUI) adapted to meet the patient’s needs and designed in accordance with his capacities.

• Service composition, which examines what specialized services to provide to the patient and the mechanisms for delivering those services in an automated and transparent way.

• Communication protocol design, which focuses on the design of an interoperable protocol to share information between medical devices and the platform.

• Security and certification, which involves selecting the various mechanisms that must be implemented in order to secure the platform and ensure confidence in its services.

• Data integration, where the consolidation of medical data is key to providing specialized services to the patient, in the case of a fall, for example, and for detecting emergencies.

• Legal constraints, which concerns the legal requirements that must be met by the platform because of the sensitivity of the data contained in medical records.

Based on the results of these research activities, validation scenarios will be implemented to demonstrate what has been achieved. These demonstrations will focus on three main health care cases:

• Diabetic patients,
• Epileptic patients,
• Patients suffering from multiple pathologies.

The medical devices collecting patient data will be included in the demonstrations. Based on those data, an assortment of services will be packaged and presented to the patient to help him establish his health care management plan. In the case of diabetic patients, this could be a home food delivery service set up in accordance with his prescribed diet, which would provide added value to the patient.

CETIC is in charge of coordinating the project and the research items related to service composition and security, and to the design of the communication protocol. CETIC is also responsible for the global integration of the platform and for conducting the demonstrations.

In 2009, CETIC put together the requirements for the earliest versions of the demonstrations, and conducted state-of-the-art studies on service composition techniques and eHealth platforms. The first validation scenario that was identified in consultation with physicians and patients’ associations is related to the follow-up of diabetic patients at home.

In 2010, CETIC began developing demonstration scenarios related to home care for diabetic patients. An in-depth study was undertaken with Walloon hospitals and diabetologists to itemise their specific needs and create the scenarios. On the basis of these scenarios, CETIC designed the architecture of the platform and the services that would be implemented. A strong focus was placed on improving communication among the actors participating in the care of these patients, which will be based on a communication link between this eHealth platform and the public sector Walloon Health Network.

CETIC has begun to implement the first of these services, which will be tested through a pilot project in the Walloon Region in 2011.