| Allergy-related respiratory diseases such as asthma and rhinitis, which are so-called respiratory allergy, constitute a major and continuous increasing problem of Public Health in Greece and worldwide. Today, 70 million European citizens suffer from chronic asthma and 100 million from allergic rhinitis. Among them, a significant proportion suffer from severe allergic disease, which affects their productivity and quality of life. These figures are expected to increase in the coming decades, introducing respiratory allergy as a pandemic. It is estimated that the cost of rhinitis in Europe is more than 100 billion on a yearly basis. The main goals of the respective treatment are summarized in monitoring and controlling symptoms, coping with them and trying to prevent future seizures. At the same time, we seek for the causative correlation with allergens so that the appropriate esensitisation therapy is followed. Monitoring of patients with allergic respiratory diseases is particularly difficult. In this context, P.A.T. (Personal Allergy Tracer) aims to create an integrated, crowdsourcing e-Health / m-Health system for the continuous monitoring of individual patient's health status and the intelligent detection of the outbreak of their allergic illness, the frequent electronic notification of the assigned physician and finally the extraction of statistics with respect to the various forms of seasonal allergies and the individuals who are affected by them. The project will deliver a research prototype for the automated monitoring of patients with respiratory allergy and the development of notification services for these patients, based on kinetic and acoustic characteristics, collected from wearables and mobile devices. The crowdsourced information, collected both from sensors and other smart devices and the patient’s self-assessment, will be exploited by health professionals to better control and manage seasonal symptoms in allergic diseases in support to decision making in the allergy related medical sector. The automated process for recording signs and symptoms of the respiratory allergy, in conjunction with the automated notification services, will decisively contribute to the control of the allergic respiratory diseases, by reducing morbidity and improving the quality of patients’ life and their performance. It will also have a positive economic impact by reducing the loss of working hours and maintaining the productivity of patients with respiratory allergy. |
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