HeartCycle

Description

HeartCycle is a European integrated project (IP), part of the sphere of ‘Personalised Health Systems’ of the 7th Marco Program for research, of the European Commission. The HeartCycle consortium is coordinated by Philips (a leader in electronic care systems) and includes experts in textiles, ICT, and support systems for user decision and interaction. 

The HeartCycle project is due to take 4 years and started in March 2008. The budget is of 20.7 million euros, of which 14.1 million have been financed by the 7th Marco Program. 

The objective of the HeartCycle project is to extend the concept of the management system for chronic disease developped in the MyHeart project, and apply it to specific groups of patients with the emphasis on improving the adherence of the patient to the medication and change in lifestyle. 

• An internal loop, the patient’s loop, which interacts directly with him to provide daily treatment. Amongst other things it will show the progress in health, including the adherence to and efficacity of the treatment. If the patient is motivated, the degree of compliance on his part (ie strict adherence to the treatment) will go up and his health will improve. This loop is connected to the information systems in the relevant hospital to guarantee top personalised care.
• An external loop, that of the professional, which involves the medical staff and which controls the cycle of patient care. This loop allows the healthcare professionals to monitor the condition of each patient as well as evaluate the response to the therapy prescribed, in such a way as to create personalised healthcare plans and detect possible deterioration in health (heart problems, for example) which may require immediate medical intervention.

ITACA takes part in the project HeartCycle through several tasks:

• Assuming the role of ‘Concept Champion’ in two of the three main use cases (‘Guided Exercise’ y ‘Assessment Use Case’). This role involves the coordination between the scientific part (the partners with medical profile and those with a more academic profile) and the technological part (those partners who develop and set up the use cases on the project context), and also the definition and obtaining of the required permissions for executing clinical studies which allow validating the developed services.
• Leading the WP5 (Professional Services), whose objective is the definition and development of the services focus on professional users (doctors, nurses, welfare agents, etc) in each one of the three main use cases. This WP acts likewise as responsible of the technical integration with the WP4 (patient services) by means of the definition and development of the communication interfaces between both of them.