About the Project

MobiGuide research's main objective is to create a scalable, secure, ubiquitously accessible, and user-friendly mobile solution for designing, deploying, and maintaining Patient Guidance Systems based on clinical guidelines and personal health records, that provide personalized evidence-based clinical recommendations, increase the patients' satisfaction and compliance to evidence-based clinical guidelines, and reduce risk to patients and healthcare costs.

Traditional clinical decision-support systems (DSS) are targeted toward care providers and see their role as providing decision-support at the point of care during patient – care-provider encounters. Until recently, patients were considered as having a very passive role as the DSS interacted only with the care provider who, in turn, was taking the patient's history, physical exam, and ordering laboratory and radiology tests, procedures, and referrals.

In the 21st century and the Internet era, patients no longer wish to have such passive role in their healthcare. With the accessibility of information in general, and healthcare information in particular, patients are more aware of their health and of possible ways to manage their health. They wish to play more active roles in their healthcare, to have access to their health records, and to choose and control who will provide their care and who could access their private information for that purpose. Patients and care providers alike want to assure that the care provided would be of the highest quality, based on up-to-date clinical evidence and cost-effective. Furthermore, they wish that they could be cared for whenever their health state requires attention no matter where they are at that time. Thus, patients need to be empowered with respect to flexibility in their actions, as well as control over the measurement and use of their own data.

Based on this motivation, we envision a knowledge-based patient guidance system (PGS) that securely interacts with the patient and his/her care provides, delivers health-related recommendations and enables access to the patient's health data, whenever a need arises, from any place, and in a user-friendly way using web and Smartphone interfaces.

The recommendations delivered will be based on evidence-based clinical guidelines that are formally represented and are executed according to the patient's clinical data.

The clinical data will be semantically integrated into a Personal Health Record (PHR) that persistently will store the patient's life-long data from hospital and care centre's electronic medical records (EMRs), as well as physiological data that will be acquired using body-wearable and portable monitoring devices at non-clinically controlled environments, additional personal information that will be acquired through a vocal interface over the Smartphone, and events and temporal abstractions of patient data delivered by the PGS.

The project team includes world-class researchers in all of the key technical areas needed for this research, including medical informatics experts on clinical-guideline based DSSs, which represent guidelines as Computer-Interpretable Guidelines (CIGs) – a representation format that enables their execution by the DSS, Body Area Networks (BANs) of body worn mobile sensors and handheld devices that support tele-monitoring of patients, data integration, health ICT standards, privacy and security, intelligent data analysis and visualization, as well as clinical experts on the domains to which the PGS system would be applied: cardiology and women's health.