Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine May 2018 - 7

By Jacek Halicki [CC BY-SA 4.0
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In order to provide HRQoL to these specific pathologies, different needs have to be taken into consideration and manifold solutions have to be designed to support patients when dismissed from
hospitals. Specifically, it is possible to identify a number of assistive domains, i.e., domains where continuous support is needed for
patients living at home, together with the most suitable technological solutions. The most relevant domains for the 7BCD can be distinguished as follows: mobility, drug adherence, cognitive training,
physical training, entrainment and social inclusion (socialization),
pervasive monitoring (Table 1).
Digging into the specific needs of each pathology is beyond the
scope of this article. However, pervasive monitoring, or comprehensive ICT-based continuous monitoring of a number of different
aspects of the life and the health of the patient (both in time and
in space) is a developing technology with lots of potential for the
health industry. Indeed, the literature has already provided evidence
on the importance of capturing small (daily) changes in the habits,
as well as in the health conditions (sleep, gait and so forth) of a patient that can be recognized as proxies of arising pathologies, such
as AD or PD. At the same time, this kind of wide and continuous assessment can bring significant insights on the disease progression.
Apart from its potential benefits for the HRQoL, the abovementioned technology-based continuous monitoring solution has
opened several ethical issues related to a patient's compliance with
technology, security, and privacy, given the large mounts of data
acquired and remotely transmitted .
Therefore, HRQoL can be viewed as a complex and multidisciplinary ecosystem where different stakeholders are interacting with
each other, infrastructures are increasingly deployed, and services
are constantly required to be improved with new customized fea-

tures. This framework definitely needs regulation for ethical issues
as well as interoperability and standardization to achieve optimal
solutions that can improve the individual-HRQoL with minimal
organizational burden.

ICT SOLUTIONS FOR HEALTH
Many of the recent ICT solutions in health-care have the goal of
achieving improvements in health monitoring and intervention, on
one hand, and making low-cost devices massively available, on
the other hand.
ICT solutions can be included into the manifold communication-navigation-sensing (CONASENSE) framework because sensing devices and related signal processing are needed to acquire and
locally process biomedical data coming from the cooperating individual; suitable communication technology is needed to efficiently
transmit such informative (mostly, compressed) data to the main
servers or to a central database for long-term storage and further
processing; and navigation mechanisms and technologies are used
to track individuals when health-related services are provided in a
mobility context.
In the following sections, special focus will be given to (1) the
state-of-the-art of communication and navigation solutions, (2) the
most recent sensing devices and, finally, (3) the most up-to-date
signal processing techniques.

COMMUNICATION/NAVIGATION
The typical scenario where communication and navigation technology are involved is represented by three main networks: (1) the

Table 1.

Association between Assistive Domains with the Seven Big Chronic Diseases (7BCD) of Our Society
Domain/7BCD

Diabetes

CVD

CRD

Cancer

Stroke

AD

PD

Mobility

X

-

-

-

X

-

X

Drug Adherence

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Cognitive
Training

-

-

-

-

X

X

X

Physical Training

X

-

-

-

X

-

X

Socialization

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Pervasive
Monitoring

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

MAY - JUNE 2018

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

7
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine May 2018
