Our project is advancing person-centered health and care models for patients suffering from chronic obstractive pulumonary disease (COPD) by utilizing novel digital technologies.
Our main purpose is to reduce disease worsening by early prediction of exacerbation events, which allows better management and prevention of complications. In the long term, we aim to reduce the burden on the healthcare systems, and indirectly improve access to services. To accomplish this, OREO will pioneer the development of a holistic digital platform, supported by an underlying AI framework, that combines analysis of speech and text narratives collected via a self-assessment app with health parameters related to comorbidities and with a plethora of triggering factors such as sleep related aspects, diet, stress, and environmental variables.
Involving over 300 users (patients, carers, and medical professionals) from 3 European countries, we aspire to make OREO significantly enhance the quality of life of people suffering from COPD.
The OREO activities are grouped in five work packages (WPs):
- ● WP1 - Management, communication and dissemination;
- ● WP2 - Platform design, development, and fine-tuning;
- ● WP3 – Smart data processing, personal profiles, and exacerbation prediction model;
- ● WP4 – End-user classification, recruitment, and pilots;
- ● WP5 – Ethics, health economics, exploitation and recommendations.
The objectives of the OREO project are:
- 1. Develop a holistic prediction model that meets the criteria for being adopted into clinical practice to transform COPD management.
- 2. Build personalized patient profiles that reflect indicators and triggers (early predictors) for each patient.
- 3. Support secondary prevention by identifying region and population-specific risk factors which can be addressed to reduce, delay, and avoid COPD development.
- 4. Create a compendium of expressions and keywords to develop educational materials that facilitate communication between clinicians and patients.
In Romania, OREO is co-funded by the National Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding – UEFISCDI and the THCS program.
Phase 1
Activity 1.1: Studies regarding the protocol for piloting activities: As part of this activity, inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants in the pilot studies were identified. All participants must have a confirmed diagnosis of COPD, regardless of disease severity. As part of our analytical approach, the collected data will be stratified based on several criteria—one of the main ones being disease severity, which will be classified using the GOLD ABE classification system (presented in the following sections). Also, during this stage, we selected the tools that can provide a comprehensive initial assessment of each patient's clinical status, psychological well-being, quality of life, and health status. The use of validated questionnaires (ADL, VAS, EQ-5D-5L) will allow for consistent and comparable data to be obtained within the study population and will support the AI framework in interpreting diary entries in the broader context of each COPD patient's experience.
Activity 1.2: Design and implementation of storage, communication, and security mechanisms for the OREO server: The OREO platform will use MongoDB as a document-oriented NoSQL database system. Each entry in the database is a document, a structure composed of field-value pairs. The database will be populated with data provided directly by participants in the pilot studies (audio recordings, responses to digital questionnaires) as well as data obtained through devices integrated into the platform. A client–server architecture (Figure 3) will be developed, which is used in most modern applications, from websites (the client is the browser, the server is the web server) to banking systems, cloud applications, or online games. Such an architecture allows for the centralization of resources and, therefore, better management of them as well as of the services that use files, databases, and applications. For managing platform users and sessions, OREO will use the Flask-Login plugin. This is a plugin (extension) for the Flask framework in Python, which facilitates user authentication management in a web application. The system exposes an authentication endpoint that other components can use to obtain Json Web Tokens (JWT) that allow access to various components of the system, cryptographically signed with a private key that services obtain access to for decryption when registering in the system.
Activity 1.3: Development of user manuals for the OREO components: The project will use state-of-the-art features and gadgets to achieve its objectives: continuous monitoring via wearable devices such as smart watches or smart rings, which measure things such as heart rate, activity, sleep, stress, etc.; speech and natural language processing using a self-reporting application; air quality monitoring using internal sensors and, where possible, verified with third-party data (such as https://airly.org/); and digital questionnaires. During this stage, the smart medical devices to be used in the project were identified and presented. Appropriate user manuals were developed, highlighting the use of important functionalities for the OREO platform, which are presented in a way that is accessible to as many users as possible.
Activity 1.4: Website, social media: We have developed the OREO logo for the visual identity of the OREO project. The project website has been developed and is maintained at the following address: http://www.citst.ro/projects/oreo/. The project also has a presence on social media with a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578745282063#.
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