Searching sanatorium for EUROSTARS CALL
Summary
"De Futuro" is an ambitious, in 2011 established company, focused on the fields of research and development, commercialization of new innovative products and services. The venture is looking for partners to collaborate on a EUROSTARS project proposal. The project aim is to develop Heart Rate Variability (HRV) parameter-based patient’s emotional and physical state evaluation system, which will be used to track patient’s emotional and physical state changes before, during and after procedures in rehabilitation institutions (etc.: sanatoriums, hospitals). “De Futuro” is searching for companies, universities, or research institutes specialized in IT to collaborate on HRV algorithm development and two sanatoriums (one in Lithuania and one in the other EU country) for system prototype testing.
Description
Problematics
In 2017, spending on health care in the European Union stood at 9.6% of gross domestic product, ranging from over 11% in France and Germany to less than 6% in Romania. In most countries, payments for curative and rehabilitative care services made up the bulk of health spending. Taking the European Union as a whole, per capita health spending reached EUR 2 773 in 2017. [1] Emotion influences human health significantly, especially negative emotion which has been regarded as a non-ignorable factor linking to the increase of health problems. It has been found that chronic experience of negative feelings such as anxiety, sadness and fear expose people to suffer a variety of physical problems such as asthma, headaches, ulcers and heart disease, as well as mental problems such as depression and Alzheimer disease. [2] Taking this to account, more and more countries understand existing need to invest more in disease prevention though residents psychological and physical state monitoring and improvement. In 2015, over 1 million deaths across EU countries were considered to be potentially preventable through effective public health and prevention interventions. In 2017, 1.3% of GDP or around EUR 194 billion of direct health care spending on a broad range of mental health conditions across the EU. This covers spending on the health services and goods related to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders (including physician visits, hospitalizations and pharmaceuticals).[1] At present, the major emotion recognition methods are subjective psychologist opinion or technology, which usually adopt facial expression, body behavior, and vocal analysis, whose results include too many subjective factors coming from the participants and experimenters, therefore the recognition accuracy has been worsened [3]. Emotion recognition based on physiological signals should be more objective and precise and that can be achieved with electrocardiogram signal (ECG) evaluation, especially knowing fact, that nowadays, more and more companies are developing wearable devices that are able to monitor heart rate and ECG, such as Fitbit, Apple watch, Microsoft Band, and so on, which provide a hardware level guarantee for ECG-based emotion recognition. Moreover, there is no technology for recreational and health institutions as sanatoriums and hospitals to evaluate both emotional and physical state of the patient before and after visiting the institution, which leads to unmeasured effectiveness of the treatment for patient, unfulfilled client’s expectations and unused potential for more costumers attraction.
Solution
„De Futuro” plans to create a system, which will evaluate patient’s emotional and physical state before and after treatment and measure improvement of it during the treatment. A novel method for negative (stress, anger, sadness) and positive (happiness, neutral) emotions detection via feature fusion from only one-channel electrocardiogram (ECG) signal, which is able to instantaneously assess the subject's state even in real-time events and calculations of its derived heart rate variability (HRV), including linear-derived features, nonlinear-derived features, time domain features, and time-frequency domain features, will be used to evaluate emotional state. HRV also will be used to evaluate physical state of the client. Using whole system recreational tourist will be able to see actual objective improvement of his mental and physical health, sanatorium will be able to use their resources effectively and attract more clients.
Main activities
1. HRV and emotion recognition algorithm (HEA) development
2. HEA testing in real life situations
3. Physical fitness level evaluation algorithm (PFLA) development
4. PFLA testing in real life situations
5. System prototype development. Integration of HEA, PFLA and development of user interface with emotional and physical state evaluation before and after rehabilitation procedures algorithms.
6. System prototype testing in recreational business partners institutions.
Partners we are looking for
The automatic quantification and recognition of human emotions is a relatively new and fast-growing research area which combines knowledge in the fields of psycho-physiology, computer science, biomedical engineering, and artificial intelligence. We are searching for partners in the fields of recreational business.
Sanatoriums
We are looking for two sanatoriums (one in other EU country), which main activity will be to implement system testing.