VAC Colloquia

"SPHERE -- Sensor Platform for HealthcarE in a Residential Environment: The Vision and The Lessons Learned"

Dr. Emma L. Tonkin  (University of Bristol, UK)

It is a truism in healthcare to state that the process of diagnosis is extremely important to patient care, increasing the likelihood of a positive outcome for the patient. However, diagnosis depends on information availability, which depends on the availability of sensors capable of eliciting the information the clinician needs. Direct observation by a clinician is naturally a starting point, but clinician time is limited and expensive. The use of large diagnostic tools offers powerful insight, but do not represent a panacea. Both of these can only provide a snapshot in time, in large part because many aspects of the patient’s lived experience simply do not show up in the timescale observed. As a result, there is considerable interest in the effectiveness of relatively small, cheap sensors, such as wearable accelerometers, as an additional data source to support the processes of diagnosis and evaluation of treatment.

The SPHERE project has explored the possibility of making use of multiple small, cheap sensors in the home to describe participants’ everyday life, testing systems in well over sixty homes over several years. The project used data drawn from a heterogeneous sensor network to support the detection of information such as activities of daily living, sleep and personal hygiene.

In this seminar, we look at the strengths and limitations of single- and multi-sensor approaches. We explore the challenges of heterogeneous (multi-sensor) system deployment, and the many difficulties that are involved in deployment of complex sensor networks in participant homes, from the effect of architecture on signal reception and networking to the identification of minimally-invasive methods of fixing removable sensors in place. We discuss the issues involved in recruiting participants, particularly the need to sensitively negotiate participant acceptance of privacy-invasive technologies such as silhouette cameras during the design process, and to identify and adopt privacy-enhancing mechanisms wherever appropriate.

We then discuss the challenges of the deployment process, particularly system monitoring, reliability engineering and repair, with a focus on whole-cohort management using configuration management systems and the urgent need to develop COVID-safe system engineering methods to safeguard vulnerable populations. Finally, we discuss lessons learned from analysing multi-sensor pervasive healthcare data alongside subject-expert clinicians, and suggest some recommendations from our own experience.

Location: Zoom
Link https://uni-rostock-de.zoom.us/j/66776113625?pwd=SmROc0hGWjlWYU9kaXFKWjhzZDNMUT09


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