Development and evaluation of a sensor-based system for remote monitoring and treatment of chronic diseases - the continuous care & coaching platform

The steep increase in the number of people with chronic diseases in the Western world is a long recognised problem which forces us to look for less labour intensive and more cost effective methods to deliver health-care. Wider use of telemedicine services seems to be a solution that can contribute substantially to reduction of costs and maintenance of health service quality at a high level, but its implementation in regular healthcare practice often fails. This is no surprise since designing, building and implementing a successful telemedicine application is no trivial task. The reasons for failure are many, and include technical problems and low us-ability, however there are also organisational factors such as the often disruptive effect the introduction of new technologies can have on existing healthcare processes. This paper presents the experience gathered when building our system: the Continuous Care & Coaching Platform (C3PO). This platform was designed to monitor patients with chronic diseases during daily life and provide them with the support they need to develop and maintain an active lifestyle in order to improve quality of life and offset deterioration of health condition. In this paper we share the lessons learned and present results of evaluation studies using earlier versions of the platform. Innovations in the field of wireless sensor technology as well as changing demands from the users led us to redesign and develop a new version of the platform. This process is described, starting with the gath-ering of requirements using a user-centred design approach and derivation of specifications. The components of the platform are described as well as results of recent evaluation studies. Our evaluations and experience with working with patients and healthcare professionals indicate that there is currently a great need to add in-telligence to the platform. The augmentation of the platform with of a smart autonomous health- and lifestyle coach is the current focus of our research which, we believe, will be a crucial next step towards the future of intelligent telemedicine applications.