Personal health systems for diagnostics of sleep disorders using new sensors and grid technology

Abstract

Personal Health Systems are developed for individualized diagnosis, prevention and treatment depending on the actual health-state of the regarding person with a minimum of interference of his or her daily life. They imply the continuous or at least frequent monitoring of the person's health status, subsequent evaluation and possible action initialization, may it be feedback to the patient, a message to the attending physician or the readjustment of a therapeutical device. In this paper, we propose personal health systems that combine new sensor and information technologies. They allow for extensive undisturbing biosignal acquisition at the person's home and comprehensive data processing and analysis using a grid infrastructure. The grid can be considered as a virtual space where people can share their personal health data with attending medical professionals and where an individual and adaptive set of processing and analysis tools is available in a uniform, easy-to-access and cost-efficient way. The current state of public IT networks and grid infrastructures may not allow real-time applications, while complex near-term postprocessing and decision support can be accomplished. The presented systems are dedicated to sleep related breathing disorders, but the underlying concept may also be suitable for other use-cases.