WELMO (Wearable Electronics for Effective Lung Monitoring) is a research project funded by the European Union
http://www.welmo-project.eu/. It aims to develop and validate a wearable vest with integrated small sensors allowing continuous recording of lung sounds and electrical impedance tomography (EIT) examination. The latter method enables the radiation-free assessment of ventilation distribution within a chest layer with a height of a few centimeters.
WELMO will be used for remote monitoring of patients with lung related chronic diseases such as COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). These conditions require regular visits to healthcare professionals (general practitioners and pulmonologists) while they are linked with exacerbations that may lead to hospitalization. Home-monitoring via WELMO, can lead to reduced number of visits to the health centers, allow early identification of deterioration and would highly improve patient health status, adherence to treatment and quality of life, as shown by previous researchers in various respiratory diseases.
In WELMO, lung sound and image signals are collected by the vest and transmitted via a patient tablet to a back-end server where they are stored and analyzed. Clinically informative features are extracted and, together with the sound signals and EIT images are evaluated by healthcare professionals on a dedicated web application. An evaluation report is then provided to the patients.
We expect that WELMO will create a paradigm regarding the development of health monitoring products, especially in the field of lung related disease management.
This questionnaire inteds to gather the feedback and the real needs of end users (HCPs) to help WELMO consortium co-design a Web Application for patient's monitoring with a participatory approach.
Filling the questionnaire should take no more than 20 minutes. If you want to zoom to images please hold Ctrl and press the plus (+) button!