MyLifeHub: An interoperability hub for aggregating lifelogging data from heterogeneous sensors and its applications in ophthalmic care

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Visual impairment is one of the most feared forms of medical disability, which imposes a great social and economic burden on our society. In the UK, the number of visually impaired people is almost 2 million, with total annual costs estimated over £13,000 million. Notably, age-related increase of visual impairment has been well-documented and is set to be on constant rise owing to the growing ageing population nowadays. Visual impairment has significant impact on quality of life (QoL), as reduced visual acuity seriously affect patients' daily and social activities, with substantial increase of risk of mortality, fracture and falls, depression and other emotional distress. A variety of responsive instruments for quantifying functional impairment related to vision have been developed. Also, there are well-recognised generic instruments for the assessment of QoL in general health terms. These instruments contain questionnaires referring to a broad range of physical, social and psychological aspects, offering the basis for establishing the QoL profiles of the individuals under concern.Any changes in the QoL profile, for instance, the increase or drop of the level of physical and social activities before and after an eye surgery, can be used as important indicators for the outcome of the treatment. However, QoL assessment through written questionnaires has several significant drawbacks. Many answers often rely on participants' memory over a long period of time; people may read differently into the questions with their own interpretations; often there is no way of validating the truthfulness of many responses. These limitations raise serious questions on the reliability and validity of the measurements. Remarkably, the rapid advance of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology grants us opportunities to build QoL profiles of individuals with increased reliability and validity by monitoring their lifelogging data captured by a variety of IoT assets (namely objects, sensors, mobile apps, web-objects, etc.) with constant connectivity and interaction in a pervasive network. MyLifeHub is such an attempt with focus on the interoperability of the IoT assets, aiming at a common, interoperable and internet-based environment for long-term lifestyle information for individuals. The system will keep users well informed about their daily activities, diet, sleep, mood, blood pressure, pulse, etc., enhancing self-awareness in health and encouraging positive attitudes towards lifestyles. Data sharing among different users will also be enabled to allow for experience exchange and to build healthcare social-networks among users. Especially, MyLifeHub will feature new techniques enabling simultaneously and long-term quantifying the functional impairment related to vision underpinned with smart glasses (e.g. Google-Glass), which provide wearable sensors to connect with the environment through RFID, infrared, Bluetooth or QR code, allowing for a constant monitoring of the behaviours of people's vision. MyLifeHub will be utilized as a platform to assess the impact of visual impairment on the QoL of ophthalmic patients both in general health terms and in vision specific terms. The research will be conducted "in the wild" through direct exposure to potential beneficiaries. Our clinical collaborator, Moorfields Eye Hospital (MEH), is the largest eye hospital in the UK and earns a reputation worldwide. The outcome of MyLifeHub will be evaluated by the end users (namely MEH and its patients), allowing for the assessment and forecast of the transformational impact of the IoT technologies in real world terms.