About Project

City Labs

Medical Imaging

January 2014 - December 2020

The main research goal of this project is to address the challenging field of eHealth by promoting and facilitating the use of ICT as a way to empower patients with chronic diseases.

More specifically, in this project, we aim to improve the diabetic patients’ care path and bridge the gap between them and healthcare professionals by developing a pilot Diabetes Remote Monitoring and Management System. There is evidence that daily monitoring and appropriate patient-specific empowerment can positively influence the lifestyle and the behavior of patients with diabetes and significantly reduce related complications. As personal face-to-face coaching is costly and hard to scale, we are convinced that mobile applications and web services have now become a key driver for chronic disease self-management.

The application currently provides support to patients with type 1 diabetes (https://beta.egle.be/). Future development will cover the type 2 diabetes, as well as heart failure condition. We collaborate with the Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc in Brussels to facilitate the UX engineering approach to increase the success in producing the user-friendly eHealth solutions that are validated by real patients.

Additionally and more generally, there is a need to raise the awareness on health screening by bringing laboratories even closer to patients. For this purpose, our project also aims to establish proximity laboratories (“City Labs”) that are easily accessible to the public and simplify the way patients can perform point-of-care (POC) and direct-to-consumer (DTC) screening. To achieve this goal, we aim to develop a mobile application to allow patients gather their labs results from City Labs (cholesterol, hemoglobin, cardiac markers, pregnancy, STDs etc.), make appointments and get a medical interpretation.

Acknowledgments: the research is supported by a Research Fellow grant from Fonds Européens de Développement Régional (FEDER).

People

Benoît Macq

Carolina Unriza Salamanca

Guillaume Gustin

Luka Rukonic

Sidney Golstein

Wei Zhao