myAirCoach

Asthma Disease
Asthma is a life-long chronic inflammatory disease of the airways that is very common worldwide, affecting people of all ages, race and gender. In addition to the clinical risks that it imposes, asthma is a huge psychological and economical burden for both the patients and their families. Unfortunately and despite the increasing prevalence of the disease more than half of asthma patients are characterised as being not well controlled.

myAirCoach Solution

The myAirCoach project aims to develop a holistic asthma monitoring system based on personalised mHealth capabilities. One of the main goals of the project is to empower patients to manage their own health by providing user friendly tools to increase the awareness of their clinical state and the adherence and effectiveness of medical treatment. Towards this direction an ergonomic, compact and efficient sensor-based inhaler will be developed that will be in continuous communication with the patients smart devices and through them with the central system of myAirCoach. The intuitive user interfaces of the components will offer to the patients the possibility to customize their treatment towards preset goals and guidelines, either automatically or driven by healthcare professional in a telemedicine manner.

The sensing infrastructure of myAirCoach will have the capability to automatically monitor several clinical, behavioural and environmental factors in realistic conditions and combine them with the aggregated knowledge of asthma. A pipeline of advanced analysis, processing and computational modelling techniques will integrate under the same framework raw measurements, extracted features, indicators, and personal profile data representation. All these sources of data will be transformed into useful knowledge about the patient’s condition and will ensure clinical state awareness and optimal treatment. Furthermore, myAirCoach is aiming to empower doctors, offering them the possibility to supervise the condition of their patients and adjust the prescribed medication. In this context, myAirCoach will give to the clinicians early indications of increasing symptoms or exacerbations, while making an important contribution fo the understanding of the mechanisms underlining the progression of asthma disease.

The myAirCoach framework will be quantified in two test campaigns with carefully designed cohorts of patients in three testing sites. Besides the obvious necessity of the test campaigns to ground the myAirCoach patient models and framework with data, the objective formal validation of the results is expected to lead to increased confidence in the myAirCoach approach and in the ICT decision support and self-management systems in general. The impact of the holistic and innovative approach of myAirCoach is expected to lay the foundations for the widespread adoption of sensor-based self-management systems across the full spectrum of respiratory diseases.

Consortium

Center for Research & Technology Hellas/ Information Technologies Institute, Greece
Imperial College London, United Kingdom
IHP Microelectronics, Germany
University of Patras, Greece
Leiden University Medical Center, Netherlands
Aerocrine AB, Sweden
University of Mancester, United Kingdom
European Federation of Asthma & Allergy Associations, Belgium
Asthma UK, United Kingdom
ZorgGemak (MedVision360 BV), Netherlands
Allertec Hellas Pharmaceutica, Greece
Cnet Svenska AB, Sweden