G-DEMANDE: Gestational Diabetes Expert-based Monitoring Aided by Networks of Distributed agent Environments

Juan Ruiz of CHUV/Service d'endocrinogie, diabétologie et métabolisme, expert in endocrinology and diabetology

Diabetes is a very common chronic illness that is the fourth leading cause of death in most developed countries. The case of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is of particular interest. It occurs during pregnancy due to increased resistance to insulin. The precise mechanisms underlying it remain unknown. About 4% of pregnant omen incur in this sort of complication. The current approach includes a planned diet, exercise and self-blood lucose monitoring tests that can be administered at home. In several cases the doctor requires that the patient visits the dietician twice per week. However, often two checks every week are not enough: as if the hyperglycemia last for more than one day, this may cause macrosomia (excessive growth of the fetus). Thus, in this cases it is important to act as fast as possible to prevent any serious complication to the mother and the baby, by normalizing the blood pressure and glucose levels with appropriate and quick treatment.

We propose the deployment of a pervasive healthcare infrastructure to collect, monitor and alert GDM patients and inform their caretakers with historical values. To setup this infrastructure, we plan a pervasive and ubiquitous multi agent system deployed pervasively in the environment and accessible to users by means of smart phone devices. We will use wearable sensors from the market currently used at CHUV to monitor the conditions of the patient.

The data produced by wearable sensors will feed the distributed multi agent infrastructure. The intelligent agents deployed in the multi agent infrastructure will use the data to pre-diagnose possible conditions and alert a health professional in charge of the patient. The project’s research program plans to illustrate how, by using intelligent cognitive agents deployed in a distributed agent environment, we can improve the current approach to diabetes treatment from the perspectives of efficiency and interoperability. In particular our primary goal is to break the boundaries of the hospital care, allowing patients to be monitored while living their day-to-day life.

The importance of the work will reside in the definition of a new technology that could be used to improve the quality of life for patients with diabetes and could be extended for patients with permanent of chronic conditions. It will not replace current treatment practices, but add new information and improve care. To build the infrastructure according to the needs of the patients, the Haute école spécialisée de Suisse occidentale and the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois will collaborate to create a model in term of rules for the diabetes treatment, focusing on the issue of GDM, and embed this model in a distributed infrastructure that can take decisions about a set of preselected CHUV patients that have GDM.

posters from 2011

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