Objectives

Policy makers and clinicians increasingly recognize that people and patients can safeguard their QoL by making healthy lifestyle choices and being actively engaged in their health care. Due to the complexity of the clinical evaluation, the evidence regarding the relationship between QoL and patient engagement is quite weak, especially within European ICT-projects. Thus, the project vCare aims to enhance the QoL and provide a reliable statement of its development.

The potential for relapse or a decline of health status closely depends on the development of the risk factors of the patient (e.g. blood pressure, weight, physical and cognitive activity, social life etc.). The rehabilitation supported by a virtual coach should facilitate the reduction of risk factors.

The virtual coaching solution should support the adherence to the individual rehabilitation program. Thereby, it becomes an essential supplement for the direct contact to the clinical specialists.

The personalisation should help to foster the patient’s health promotion. Especially in the case of non-chronic diseases, an adequate health promotion can lead to a long-term behavioural change of habits, which decreases the economic effects and the probability of a relapse.

The system will serve an integration of clinical pathways, as they allow a patient-specific adjustment of the rehabilitation program to the patient’s needs and progression in the recovery.

The coaching environment will provide various coaching services (in terms of the type of application and interaction). These services will be configurable in order to personalise the intensity, content and requests, enabling an optimal engagement of the patient.

The coaching environment will provide various coaching services (in terms of the type of application and interaction). Coaching services have to be configurable to personalize the intensity, content, and requests for an optimal engagement of the patient.

The open environment platform design requires an approach that allows integrating information from different sources such as cognitive and physical data of the patient, information about his/her environment or of the progress within the clinical pathway. Semantic technologies provide the ability to identify and interpret all information in the rehabilitation context and thus can be used.

The scalability of the vCare needs to be proofed in different European Countries and technical infrastructures.

The acceptance of a virtual coaching solution is crucial for the patient’s motivation, leading to his/her participation. Hence, the patient (and his/her medical care givers) as main recipient of such a system will consequently be included in each development phase.

vCare requires being used in different national systems and ICT infrastructures and for different diseases and rehabilitation settings. Thus, a multi-site and multi-setting approach is applied.

To reach a broad audience and different markets for the project results, the vCare consortium aims to follow a multi-channel exploitation, where the market and scientific exploitation are linked closely to each other.