Marcos Zúñiga Barraza, PhD; Nicolás Jara Carvallo, PhD; Mohamed Abdelhamid, PhD; Antonio Lira B., CEO
Competition Sponsor: National Agency for Research and Development of Chile
We propose an integral telehealth platform for elderly care, where patient’s vital signs are automatically monitored through artificial vision, while video conferencing with the medical staff. The platform will be available in mobile, web, and tablet formats, and will only use the available camera devices to perform any interaction (connection with the medical staff and monitoring of vital signs), providing real-time feedback to the specialists for performing a better diagnostic or treatment monitoring of the patient. The solution will also manage medical information (medical images, clinical file, and medical exams), will allow easy scheduling of meetings with specialists, and will provide useful medical information to elderly patients, in a simple and easy way, adapted to their needs. The solution will implement automatic vital sign monitoring as: Heart Rate (HR), HR variation (HRV), respiration rate (RR), oxygen saturation (SpO2), body temperature, blood pressure, and patient stress; estimated through non-invasive artificial vision approaches.
The solution will be integrated to an existing telemedicine platform developed by our partners. The plan for reaching a functional prototype considers four phases:
1. Identify and benchmark state-of-the-art techniques on automatic estimation of the vital signs and biological factors of interest: HR, HRV, SpO2, body temperature, blood pressure, and patient stress.
2. Improve the precision and computational load of the benchmarked techniques, considering real test subjects, to reach medical level precision.
3. Integrate the developed algorithms for using vital sign monitoring within the existing telemedicine platform.
4. Adapt the platform for simplified usability, for satisfying elderly patient requirements.