Telemonitoring makes possible to remotely assess health status and quality of life of individuals. By acquiring heterogeneous data coming from sensors (physiological, biometric, environmental; non-invasive, adaptive and transparent to user) and data coming from other sources to become aware of user context; by inferring user behaviour and detecting anomalies from this data; and by providing elaborated and smart knowledge to clinicians, therapists, carers, families, and the patients themselves, we will be able to foster preventive, predictive and personalized care actions, decisions and support. In this paper, by relying on a novel sensor-based telemonitoring and home support system, the authors are focused on monitoring mobility activities; the ultimate goal being to automatically assess quality of life of people. In particular, the authors are aimed at answering to an item of a quality-of-life questionnaire, namely “Mobility”. Although the authors are interested in assisting disabled people, we performed preliminary experiments with a healthy user, as a proof of concept. Results show that the approach is promising. Thus, the authors are now in the process to install the final system in a number of disabled people's homes under the umbrella of the BackHome project.
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed and is continuously posing enormous societal and health challenges worldwide. The research community has mobilized to develop novel projects to find a cure or a vaccine, as well as to contribute to mass testing, which has been a critical measure to contain the infection in several countries. Through this article, we share our experiences and learnings as a group of volunteers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain. As members of the ORFEU project, an initiative by the Government of Catalonia to achieve mass testing of people at risk and contain the epidemic in Spain, we share our motivations, challenges and the key lessons learnt, which we feel will help better prepare the global society to address similar situations in the future.
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