HEAL: A Health Analytics Intelligent Agent Platform for the acquisition and analysis of physiological signals

Abstract

Effectively caring for patients suffering from chronic diseases is a challenging and costly task. There is a need to decrease the cost of treating these chronic patients, while increasing the quality of the care provided to the patients. Mobile health (mHealth) technologies such as remote monitoring, telemedicine, and home-based monitoring have become effective tools shifting the focus towards a more patient-centric healthcare. In this paper we present HEAL, an intelligent healthcare analytics and personal agent platform. The HEAL personal agent enables on-the-go continuous monitoring of covert and overt signals from patients. The HEAL agent consists of a pipeline that aggregates signals from devices and sensor types. The platform collects motion profiles, and user annotation for performing activity recognition and stress level detection. We evaluate the HEAL platform on patients suffering from essential hypertension and show that an intelligent personal mobile agent is capable of monitoring, analyzing and tracking the characteristics of hypertension management.