Telemedicine cheaper rehabilitation for older people.

Spain, 2011-September Improving clinical care received by patients facing serious situations, such as acquired brain injury or chronic pathologies, generates new socio-health challenges in the field of Bioengineering and telemedicine.

Under the programme of the European Commission ICT, researchers of the < http: www.upm.es>Universidad Polytechnic of Madrid, in collaboration with a European Consortium, have developed the project CLEAR (Clinical Leading Environment for the Assessment of rehabilitation protocols in home care) to establish and evaluate new services tele-rehabilitación in four countries of the EU MemberSpain, Italy, Netherlands and Poland. The objective of the study is the setting up of the European platform of tele-rehabilitación Habilis, to help the standardisation of e-health and rehabilitation, in the European Union.

This platform will be integrated into hospitals, with information systems which has the health centre, both technological and clinically ”, explains Enrique j. Gómez, Professor of the ETSI Telecomunicación UPM project team coordinator. From a clinical point of view, physiotherapists and neuropsychlogists will offer these specialized services within your clinical routine, so that the platform will help both the patient and medical personnel to perform these services tele-rehabilitación ”, added Gómez.

Rehabilitation in the home of the patient environment

Habilis platform will help the therapist by advertising the procedures of rehabilitation that has to make the patient at home, once it has executed some of them own hospital. This, says Professor of UPM, will require a remote monitoring of patients, enabling a synchronous communication, through low-cost technologies, such as video conferencing services, for example, in the case of a cognitive rehabilitationa neuro-psychologist may serve a greater number of patients in a more eco-friendly environment and reduce the current cost of health systems ”.

Through the platform, in accordance with the improvement of the patient, you can plan a new therapy or modify any aspect to optimize. To develop the project, has created a management and collaborative content portal based on web technologies 2.0 and interface design focused on the user, under criteria of usability.

CLEAR aims to establish an e-health service innovator, based on the development of protocols for chronic disease and rehabilitation therapies. This is intended to improve the quality of life of patients, reducing the need to go to health centres and improving the effectiveness and utilization of the resources of the health centres, increasingly more limited.

Sustainable technologies for older people

To demonstrate the usefulness of these sustainable technological solutions, tele-rehabilitación services will be evaluated by a group of more than 1000 patients. Its advantages and innovations will benefit older people divided into three main groups of patients: those who have suffered a brain-vascular incident, known as the stroke, that must be a process of cognitive and functional rehabilitation beyond specialized Centre, once the acute phase has passed. The second group together patients with chronic complications, such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Finally, the third group consists of those patients who have has practiced surgery for a hip or knee prosthesis implantation.

UPM has coordinated the technical part of CLEAR in collaboration with the Italian company sign Motus, leader of the project. This Spanish University has played three fundamental tasks: development of own Habilis platform, user interface design and the module of interoperability to facilitate integration into the platform for other modules of rehabilitation, as well as with existing hospital information systems.

According to stresses César Cáceres, technical responsible of the project within the Bioengineering and telemedicine of the ETSI Telecomunicación UPM group, will be possible, for example, integrate the PREVIRNEC system of cognitive rehabilitation of Institut Guttmann, one of the partners in this project, the platform Habilis, so that from this it can also communicate with the patient’s medical history ”.

Habilis Europe

In addition, CLEAR create Habilis Europe Consortium, its commercial exploitation and expansion to other European countries. In this way, there will be a Spain Habilis, Habilis Holland or Habilis Italy. All of them will be coordinated by Habilis Europe, with the aim of improving rehabilitation services currently offered to present a clear limitation in establishing treatment over the health centre.

With a budget of more than five million euros and coordinated by the Italian company sign Motus s.r.l., the project is comprised of 13 entities from four States members (Italy, Spain, Netherlands and Poland). Among them, in addition to the UPM are the Fundació Privada Institut of Neurorehabilitació Guttmann (Spain), the Roessingh Research and Development Centre (Netherlands), the Medical University of Warsaw (Poland), and the Institute Superiore di Sanitá (Italy).