Research Challenges
Current European and Chinese healthcare systems risk to be unsustainable in the near future to the challenges that result from a growth in chronic diseases. Indeed, chronic diseases are the leading cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide and affects both young and middle-aged as well as old people.
Personal health coaching programs can represent a valid solution, since they aim to reduce health risks by guiding people towards a healthier lifestyle as a prevention and management tool of lifestyle-based chronic diseases.
HEART will develop an integrated activity recognition platform for (personal) health services based on a personalized approach of mobile health coaching programs that involves the user and is tailored to individual needs. In effect, personal health coaching programs are more likely to be successful when they are built on the basis of the user’s needs, offering coaching advice that is adapted to the health status, lifestyle and personality of the user.
HEART will address the following research challenges:
- Data analytics for personal health coaching. Data acquired from wearable and mobile devices (e.g. smart watches, smartphones) result in large multimodal streams of data, which have to be translated into actionable insights for the management of personal lifestyles.
- Data processing for personal health coaching. A large amount of data also needs the necessary requirements of data processing. A model of dynamically allocation of processing power will be developed taking into account sensor node resources, privacy requirements and availability of data.
- Protection of private and personal information. IT solutions should be able to protect users’ privacy and comply with privacy laws from the conception to the commercialization of products and services.
- Consumer perspective and Market penetration. In order to exploit the Internet of Things’ innovation potential also abroad, and more specifically in the emerging Chinese market, solutions have to be tailored to the needs, behaviours and habits of Chinese consumer and to the Chinese legal, industrial and cultural context.