1. The BackHome project aims to assist people with disabilities transitioning back home after being discharged from institutional care using telemonitoring and assistive technologies like brain-computer interfaces. 2. A key challenge is automating the assessment of patients' quality of life (QoL), which is important for profiling. The presentation proposes using pervasive sensors and systems to continuously monitor mobility, activities, pain, and other factors outlined in the standardized EQ-5D questionnaire to assess QoL without direct patient surveys. 3. Preliminary prototypes are being installed and tested at clinical sites to collect data and refine the approach, with the goal of developing an integrated smart home healthcare monitoring system that can automatically evaluate patients' health status

1. 1
ICAART 2013
15th February 2013
Eloisa Vargiu
Barcelona Digital
Technology Center
User Profiling of
People with Disabilities
A joint work with:
Luigi Ceccaroni, Laia Subirats, Suzanne Martin and Felip Miralles

2. Outline of the talk
 BackHome Project
 Telemonitoring and Home Support in
BackHome
 The Challenge: Automated Assessment of
Quality of Life
 Conclusions & Future Work
2

3. 3
 … BackHome Project

4. Aim & Motivation
 The long term rehabilitation goal for
individuals with an acquired brain
injury is resettlement back in the
community away from institutional
care
 The ideal scenario is that the
person will return to her/his
previous home and life roles

5. Aim & Motivation
 In the early post-discharge phase, additional
home care is provided to support the
individual and their family
 Unfortunately, the provided support is often
not long enough to achieve the maximum
possible independence
 The transition to the home is often very
difficult and traumatic for the individual and the
carers

6. BackHome Main Goal
 To assist people with disabilities back home
after a discharge(*)
(*) Daly, J., Armstrong, E., Miralles, F., Vargiu, E., Müller-Putz, G., Hintermller, C., Guger,
C., Kübler, A., and Martin, S. (2012). BackHome: Brain-neural-computer interfaces on
track to home. In RAatE 2012 -Recent Advances in Assistive Technology &Engineering.

7. BackHome Objectives
 To study the transition from the hospital to
the home
 To learn how different BNCIs and other
assistive technologies work together
 To learn how different BNCIs and
other assistive technologies can help in the
transition from the hospital to the home
 To reduce the cost and hassle of the transition
from the hospital to the home

8. A Reference Scenario
 Chara is a painter in her thirties
 About eight years ago she started to have difficulties
holding her paint brush
 She was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
and became tetraplegic and artificially ventilated
 She was so depressed that she refused treatment
when diagnosed with pneumonia
 She survived and just recently had her first session
with BNCI-based Brain Painting(*)
(*) Münssinger, J., Halder, S., Kleih, S., Furdea, A., Raco, V., H¨ osle, A., andK ¨ ubler, A.
(2010). Brain painting: First evaluation of a new BCI application with ALS-patients and
healthy volunteers. Front Neurosci, 4:182.

9. 9
 … telemonitoring and home
support in BackHome
Vargiu, E., Miralles, F., Martin, S., and Markey, D. (2012).
BackHome: Assisting and telemonitoring people with
disabilities. In RAatE 2012 - Recent Advances in As-sistive Technology & Engineering.

10. Telemonitoring & Home Support
 Telemonitoring & Home Support Systems
(TMHSSs) provide a range of services which
enable patients to transition more smoothly
into the home environment and be maintained
for longer at home
 TMHSSs
 Facilitate services which are convenient for patients,
avoiding travel whilst supporting participation in basic
healthcare
 Can be a cost effective intervention which
promotes personal empowerment

11. The BackHome Approach
Care
Center
HomeUser Social
Environment
TMHSS
Contexts

12. The BackHome Approach
Care
Center
HomeUser Social
Environment
TMHSS
Functionalities
Personal
Autonomy
Cognitive
Rehabilitation
Social
Autonomy
Remote
monitoring
QoL Assessment

13. The BackHome Approach
Care
Center
HomeUser Social
Environment
TMHSS
Personal
Autonomy
Cognitive
Rehabilitation
Social
Autonomy
Remote
monitoring
QoL Assessment
Technologies
Ambient Intelligence
Automatic
Quality of Life
Assessment
SystemRemote Cognitive
Rehabilitation
Brain Neural
Computer
Interface
Complementary
Interfaces

14. The TMHSS
Smart-Nodes
GAS
Temperature
Wearable
Sensors
Gyro
ECG
EMG
Smart-objects
Twitter
Toys
AmI
AmI is the “glue” technology
providing the intelligent baseline framework
Robot

15. The TMHSS
 Physical autonomy (smart home control)
 To turn on/off a TV
 To open/close a curtain
 To set the room temperature
 Social autonomy (social networking)
 To communicate with the therapists
 To communicate with relatives
 To communicate with friends

16. The TMHSS
 Performing cognitive activities through
 a communication system
• to plan future patient activities
• to personalize exercises and activities
 sensors-based technologies
• to monitor exercise execution and performance
• to perform cognitive activities (e.g., Brain Painting)
 smart objects
• to perform cognitive rehabilitation task (e.g., with a
robot)

17. The TMHSS

18. The TMHSS
 QoL is the subjective experiences or
preferences expressed by an individual in
relation to specified aspects of her/his life, with
a particular reference to the health status

19. The TMHSS
 The QoL assessment system will help answer
basic questions about the state of the user,
such as
 “is she depressed?”
 “has she decreased her activity level?”
 “is she more engaged in social interactions?”
BackHome
Heterogeneous
information collected by
the system
User
health status

20. 20
 … The Challenge
Automated Assessment of
Quality of Life

21. QoL Assement as User Profiling
 The idea
 A relevant part of the profile of people with health
diseases is their QoL
 How to assess QoL
 Several questionnaires have been proposed and
adopted
 The user is asked to answer to a predefined set of
questions about her/his mental and
psychological status and feeling

22. The Challenge
 Open Issue
 It could become boring and annoying for a user to
answer to them, especially if they are asked to do
that very frequently
 Our Proposal
 Automated assessment of QoL

23. The Adopted Questionnaire
 EQ-5D(*)
 A standardized measure of health status
 Provides a simple, generic measure of health for
clinical and economic appraisal
 Provides a simple descriptive profile and a single
index value for health status that can be used in the
clinical and economic evaluation of health care as
well as in population health surveys
(*) The Euroqol Group (1990). Euroqol a facility for the measurement of health-related
quality of life. Health Policy, 16:199–208.

24. The Adopted Questionnaire

25. The Adopted Questionnaire
Geyh, S., Cieza, A., Kollerits, B., Grimby, G., and Stucki, G. (2007). Content comparison
of health-related quality of life measures used in stroke based on the international
classification of functioning, disability and health (ICF): a systematic review. Quality of
Life Research, 16(5):833–851.

26. Pervasive QoL Assessment
 Mobility
 through location sensors

27. Pervasive QoL Assessment
 Self-care
 in principle, also self-care
activities can be monitored
by relying on suitable
sensors
 for privacy issues, we
decided to not monitor such
activities

28. Pervasive QoL Assessment
 Usual Activities (housework,
education and/or leisure
activities)
 through the BNCI system
 Usual Activities (family and
friends relationships)
 through the support of
communication system
 through the support of social
network

29. Pervasive QoL Assessment
 Pain/Discomfort
 through text mining
algorithms applied on social
networking and
communication activities

30. Pervasive QoL Assessment
 Anxiety/Depression
 through the BNCI system
(fatigue, spasticity, stress)
 through text mining
algorithms applied on social
networking and
communication activities

31. Pervasive QoL Assessment
 Health state
 by performing inference on
all the data gathered by the
BNCI system, the wearable
sensors and the social
communications

32. 32
 … Conclusions & Future
Work

33. Conclusions
 Profiling people with functional diversity
 QoL assessment
 BackHome challenge
 Pervasively assessing the QoL automatically
 Preliminary proposal
 A smart home healthcare monitoring system
 EQ-5D questionnaire

34. Work in Progress
 Definition of an ad-hoc BackHome questionnaire
 Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) questionnaire
 First prototype installation and testing
 Cedar Foundation (U.K.)
 Univ. of Würzburg (Germany)

35. Future Work
 Data analysis of the data provided by the first
testing phase
 Selection of wearable sensors according to user
requirements

36. Acknowledgements
 BackHome
 Website: www.Backhome-FP7.eu
 The research leading to these results has received
funding from the European Community's, Seventh
Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013,
BackHome project grant agreement n° 288566
 Consortium

37. Thanks for your
attention!
37
evargiu@bdigital.org