Overview

The technologies developed in METABO will provide a greater flow of information between patients and physicians, increasing the degree of patient self-management and helping physicians improve the medical treatments and diagnosis.

METABO is an intelligent system that collects information from patients using sensors and a Portable Mobile Device (PMD). It processes and interprets these data establishing relationships among the reported activities and the metabolic status of the users and then displays all this to the patients and physicians in such a way that can facilitate their understanding of the situation and, thus, their decision-making. The METABO system also represents a new channel of communication for doctors and patients.

PMD records sensor data and other manually-entered information. It stores all this recently-acquired information and is also endowed with decision-making capabilities. Communicates wirelessly with the Central System.
The METABO Central System is located in a Hospital, doctors’ premises or a Healthcare Institution and serves as a complete patient management system.
The Control Panel is a web-based application that communicates with the Central System and is responsible to provide the doctor with all patient-related contextual information, as well as to offer him/her with advanced tools that allow for personalized treatment prescription and lifestyle recommendations.

Through the system, personalized recommendations, tailored prescriptions and goals to be achieved by patients are sent from the Physicians’ Control Panel to the patients through the METABO Central System and received in the Patients’ Mobile Device.

In the other hand, METABO deals with the lack of standardization in Diabetes Disease Treatment and with the need to personalize better patients’ care. For this, METABO offerst to professionals a dedicated tool to help them identifying the most suitable clinical pathway for them and modify it as it becomes necessary along the disease progression and patients’ circumstances.

Besides the high complexity of diabetes as a chronic disease, the current Diabetes Management suffers other difficulties that METABO addresses in a global context through the platform:

Variability: Diabetes is one of the diseases with the highest degree of variability in terms of health care provision, which standards are different within the different Health Care Systems, within different cities, within different hospital and even within different units in the same hospitals.
Lack of Objective Information: Diagnoses are many times based in the information coming from the patients diaries, which can be unsuficient or too subjective and be misleading.
Lack of Continuity in the Health Care Processes: There is a need to move forward to global and continuous versus “critic event” care.

This project has, on top of this, the objective to face the following challenges:

Scientific challenge to find solutions to integrate continuous glucose monitoring into disease management for a larger group of patients that what considered today, to identify and implement a pragmatic but reliable personal modellization approach for metabolic control, to achieve an optimal individual patient’s care and prevent unpredicted risks and dangerous situations related to unexpected hypoglycemic events in the vision of empowering the patients as primary actors in their personal care and to provide doctors, researchers and health-care managers with new instruments to increase patient’s data acquisition and interpretation.
Technology challenge to develop technical solutions i.e. an integrated technological platform enabling the integration and interoperability of different monitoring devices acceptable by patients and effective for health professionals for the implementation of the continuous monitoring and modeling concept and the natural access and usage of technologies and devices for a safer and less restricted life.
Social and psychological challenge to create non-invasive and easy-to-use integrated solutions motivating patients to use them to improve their quality of life.
Provision of a tool to set goals to achieve changes in lifestyle and keep track of the benefits derived from these changes. For example, a combined prescription of diet and physical activity can be set by the professional, and a simulation tool is available in the patient application to let the user know whether a certain meal or exercise would be compliant or not with this prescription. Patients will have a continuous feedback on their evolution and recommendations and motivation messages will be released when each of the intermediate objectives is achieved
Economical challenge to demonstrate that the solution is affordable for citizens, convenient for the healthcare and welfare system and that the technical research leads to the widening of market opportunities for business actors.