Smart Home-based Health Platform for Behavioral Monitoring Diabetes and Obesity

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): SmartHome-based Health Platform for Behavioral Monitoring and Alteration for Diabetic and Obese Individuals Executive Summary. Researchers in the social and life sciences, as well as medical researchers and practitioners, have long sought the ability to continuously and automatically monitor research subjects or patients for a variety of conditions or disorders. Additionally, the use of monitoring data to influence treatment dosage or regimen within real-time constraints is an important objective of behavior modification practice for psychological, medical, and sports-medicine therapies. In terms of practical constraints related to health care, the United States faces several important obstacles to delivering acceptable quality-of-service at a reasonable unit cost per patient. Firstly, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke are but a few manifestations of patient noncompliance with respect to diet, exercise, and medication. Secondly, Alzheimer's and other senility-related disorders, although of different etiology, threaten to overload our health care delivery and maintenance systems, resulting in potentially severe economic impact. As one example, over the past two decades the prevalence of overweight and obesity has increased at an alarming rate throughout the U.S. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions (2004) show that 60% of all adults in Florida are overweight or obese. Excess body weight contributes to numerous harmful consequences, including diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, arthritis, and certain cancers. Sedentary lifestyle and high caloric intake are important contributors to the obesity epidemic and to the development of many chronic diseases. It is well known that diet and exercise can significantly reduce the prevalence of obesity. However, lifestyle and economical factors makes it difficult for individuals to self-assess and self-modify their behavior. For example, studies in the United States and abroad have found that improved blood glucose control markedly benefits people with diabetes. Every percentage point decrease in A1C blood test results reduces the risk of eye, kidney and central nervous system complications by 40 percent. In response to these significant challenges in life sciences research and healthcare, we propose to develop a monitoring and analysis platform consisting of economically deployable connectivity technology and personal wearable devices. This will enable the automatic gathering of rich behavioral information in a manner transparent to the patient, which will be automatically or humanly analyzed and reported to care givers for analysis, and interpreted for behavior modification in individuals or in the context of a social network. The proposed prototype and research will foster cross-disciplinary discoveries and innovations in the life sciences and medicine, and will facilitate behavior modification in support of research in social, behavioral, and medical science. This will be achieved through dissemination of research results on the Internet and World- Wide Web, as well as training seminars and curriculum design to facilitate the education and training of students, researchers, and medical professionals who will use the proposed technology. SmartHome-based Health Platform for Behavioral Monitoring and Alteration for Diabetic and Obese Individuals Project Narrative The proposed project will empower researchers in the social and life sciences, as well as medical researchers and practitioners with high tools for continuous and impact automated remote monitoring and intervention. The proposed project exploits technological advances to realize a higher quality healthcare at a lower unit cost per patient. The proposal focus on the management of obesity and diabetes will benefit a large and growing segment of the population, while providing a wider applicable foundation for other healthcare problems and practices.