Wearable Computing for Behavioral Change in Chronic Disease Management

With Dr. Katarzyna Wac

Abstract: An increasing availability of miniaturized computing, storage and communication resources for personal wearable electronics devices as well as the availability of diverse sensors for human vital signs (e.g., heart rate, respiration) enable the development of a wide variety of wearable systems for ambulatory psychophysiological measurements. These systems pave the way for acquisition of quality data relevant for research studies or clinical practice in a healthcare domain carried out outside of the controlled laboratory environments. To date, there exists a number of such systems, however, neither the systems themselves nor details on their features are easily accessible by healthcare practitioners interested in their use for research or regular healthcare practice. In this presentation we outline the results of our initial survey on the state-of-the-art in off-the-shelf wearable Body Area Network (BAN) systems for ambulatory psychophysiological measurements and their features. We first present a high-level overview and definition of such a BAN for healthcare use, especially for chronic disease management. We discuss its relevant features and the issues influencing the system performance and usability (e.g., wearability), and therefore influencing the clinical outcome of the BAN use. We highlight some design challenges and open issues that still need to be addressed to make such systems effective for chronic care management.

Short bio: Katarzyna Wac is since 2010 with the Institute of Services Science of University of Geneva (Switzerland). She holds a BSc and MSc in Computer Science, MSc in Telematics, and PhD in Information Systems. In 2003-2004 she was a researcher at University of Twente, the Netherlands and 2004-2009 at University of Geneva. In 2009-2010 she was on leave at Carnegie Mellon University (USA). She researches pervasive mobile computing and communication in eHealth.

Date: Monday, October 31th, 2011 - 6.15 pm

Location: Battelle building A - Auditorium ground floor

31 octobre 2011

À la Une