engleski

Health care issues within ambient assisted living

Health technology and increased medical knowledge enable accurate diagnostics and effective treatment. Even the diseases that only a decade ago were not easy to manage can now be cured. Therefore the attention of the modern society is focused on prevention, early diagnostic and life quality improvement. Since the average age of the population is increasing considerably, especially in developed countries, policy makers decided to encourage a number of research and development projects for ambient assisted living. The projects goal is to develop appropriate technologies for the whole population, with special emphasis on elderly people. The aim of the projects is not only to monitor and improve health of individuals, but also to increase their independence, mobility, safety and social contact through increased communication, inclusion and participation using available technologies. A number of new medical devices within health monitoring, home and personalized care, wellness promotion, gerontotechnology, etc. have to be designed, tested and adopted to the special needs of different population groups. In this paper, an overview of some solutions presented in literature as well as our own development is presented. In particular, we have researched early wheezing detection. Wheezing often accompanies pulmonary pathologies and its detection is considered of great importance for the diagnosis and management of respiratory diseases. We have developed a simple and robust system for wheeze detection in respiratory sound spectra to be used for long-term monitoring and early stage assessment of asthma episodes. The robustness of the algorithm enables wheezing detection in presence of noise and moving artifacts. The algorithm we used for wheeze detection is based on the idea of frequency domain peak detection because of its simplicity and scoring used for specifying the likelihood that the peaks in power spectra represent wheezes. Using the scoring algorithm we were able to create a binary image of the spectrogram of the sounds - wheezes and score the relative duration of sound components considered as wheezing.

Health care; ambient assisted living

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