Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the major cause of death in the UAE, causing one in every five deaths. Effective Cardiac Rehabilitation (CR) can significantly improve mortality and morbidity rates, leading to longer independent living and a reduced use of healthcare resources. The proposed project, named Care4MyHeart, sets an overall goal to introduce a personalized home-based CR program, enabling lifestyle behavioral change towards increased quality of life, surpassing the currently unsustainable provision of healthcare for CVD. This multidisciplinary project aims to empower ordinary CVD patients to become “expert patients” and be their own primary caregiver with the know-how to self-manage their CVD.
The proposed Care4MyHeart platform will help reduce patients’ CVD risk by gradually establishing a behavior change in their everyday living routine. It will utilize advanced machine learning and modeling techniques to provide gender- and age-specific CVD exercise programs and an autonomous helper-agent, providing informed feedback to the patient and the healthcare provider, establishing a collaborative patient-professional partnership. Overall outcome will be a ‘co-production of health’ business model from a multi-stakeholder eco-system, towards the integration of Care4MyHeart into healthcare systems across Arab countries and internationally. Care4MyHeart will be realized via motion capture, exercise evaluation, physiological and lifestyle monitoring, exercise gaming, home-based human-computer interfacing, multi-parametric data modeling, and advanced decision support systems. The overall concept and system are easily transferable to address other diseases/conditions (e.g., diabetes, osteoporosis, obesity), providing market opportunities for the commercialization of Care4MyHeart beyond CVD, thus aligning with the major targets of the Abu Dhabi 2030 healthcare plan. Care4MyHeart will be realized in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic AD and it is expected to establish Khalifa University as an internationally recognized center of excellence in personalized healthcare, generate intellectual property, and expose graduate and undergraduate students to the state-of-the-art in signal processing-, biomedical engineering- and healthcare-related research.
