The future of healthy living with technologies

To finalize let’s speak about the next steps in this research area. As you can see in slide 16. Now a days by integarting different data sources social media, wearbles, electronic health records we can get a very comprehencive view of the context of the pateints. All the things are affecting our health. People are sharing social media while they are eating taking pictures of dates With Wearbles we can learn about their physical activity patterns,sleep qaulity etc. If you combine that with electronic health records we can run ? data analytics which can be used to help the decision making process of both professionals and patients.

When we are speaking about healthy living, we are not only speaking about diagnosis of conditons, and physiological aspects like Blood pressurre, you have diabetes, obesity. There are many other factors you can see in slide 17. There are social structure which they measure with health. Whether we are male or female, change quite a lot. Income has been proven to have also an influence in the health. Environmental factors expecially everything that has to do with pollution. Pollution is becoming major issue in many cities.

like for example: dust storms, and also we have to take into consideration a climate change with very serious heat waves, extreme weather that affects and then very the population. And then, very important, all the lifestyle issues, including mental well being. Things like diet, activity and sleep quality play a mjaor role in you health. If you can get all that information about the context of the user from social media, wearables, and electronic health records For example we can play dashboard that will help the (human makers?) For example, professional taking care of the elderly. We can develop personalized application to give feedback coaching to elderly patients.

And also, why not, we can use those data sources to try to understand what influence the health of the individuals.

A little discussion about the next steps in this area. One of the issues that we are facing is that we dont exactly how to implement those technologies in the real setting. Often when we implement this technology in nursing homes and home of elderly, we will fail. And we don’t know exactly why. So it’s not really just an ?. Sometime there are cultural factor playing a role, is the workflow in the hospital, etc. To…unless this issue, what we need to do is more implementation research. Trying to identify which is the best way to implement this new technology in the real setting. As you have seen in this presentation, ?

than the previous one, most of the samples are related to either diabetes, obesity, cancer, but does it really make sense to only address one condition? When most of the elderly people will have actually several conditions. Are we going to have twenty different systems for each disease? I don’t think that’s right so we should really try to make systems that are tailored for the particular health issues of one patient, and by patient, we have to consider all the different aspects and not only one particular disease even more.

We should stop addressing elderly as a patient, because at the end of the day, they are just individual that want to have a healthy lifestyle so we should focus on the healthy living and not so much about the disease In the slide 19, I would like to just emphasize some very important challenges. Implementation research, is something very important. When we are integrating lots of heterogeneous data sources, we have many technical challenges. Like, how, the quality of the data, how to analyze it, how to clean the data, etc. And nevertheless, we need to speak about ethical issues, cultural and legal issues. Right now, data is getting distributed across many different systems, but there are different legal frameworks.

For example, Fitbit may take the data into the UK and, if you are interested in wearable there is a Finnish company Withings. Then in becomes a legal issue to integrate that(multi-country) data, in addition to other technical challenges that we have.