Extended monitoring to support healthy lifestyles

One of the greatest challenges facing governments and society today is improving the health of the population while reducing the costs and burden on health sector resources. Empowering people and organisations to take greater ownership of their health, wellbeing and lifestyle is one of the essential precursors to achieving that goal. Today’s emerging telecare technologies are early enablers for such empowerment, and over the coming years the use of assistive technologies will become commonplace across a wider range of social and age groups as society grows more conscious of long-term health and the importance of lifestyle.

Implicit in the growing use of assistive technology is the wide scale deployment of technologies that capture data on relevant human activities and behaviours, ostensibly for the purposes of the health and lifestyle related services that people subscribe to. However, that behavioural data contains an information richness that has commercial value in a diversity of large sectors in addition to health. The objective of the LIPHE research project is to explore new ways of exploiting that information-rich landscape that will ultimately enable BT to deliver new service offerings across several diverse sectors, all from the same underlying data set.

LIPHE - Lifestyle Management through Personal Health & Well-being Services

The sectors of interest to the LIPHE research project span a variety of businesses, each with specific requirements and operating circumstances. For example, there is a growing expectation on employers to be fully engaged in the promotion of a positive wellbeing of their employees, both in and away from the physical workplace. The private health and life insurance sectors are exploring new business models in which clients’ annual premiums might be based on evidential data of their health and lifestyle regime. Pharmaceutical corporations wish to have a continuous rolling view of the take-up of their products within the populace and how well aligned they are to consumers’ requirements, so that they can develop appropriate product roadmaps. Similarly high street pharmacies and health food outlets wish to have a rolling view of societal fashions in health and lifestyle in order to map their broad product range more closely to such a dynamic market. The fundamental motivation for much of the above is for these businesses to become more productive and profitable, while at the same time being able to more effectively track and respond to consumer changes.

This research program is exploring which new services would be appropriate to address those requirements and develop new capabilities to underpin those services. This will open up new large-scale business opportunities for BT that exploit networked IT services and the capabilities of the 21st Century Network. The research is focussing on the underlying methodologies to capture data from a variety of sources, extract information that is specific to particular sectors and user groups, and deliver it securely to approved recipients.