Bernd Blobel

• Dr. habil.
• Professor at University of Regensburg

Background: Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) are essential tasks performed at home and used in healthcare to monitor sedentary behavior, track rehabilitation therapy, and monitor chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The Barthel Index, used by healthcare professionals, has limitations due to its subjectivity. Human activity recognition (HAR) is a...

Background/Objectives: Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) are crucial for assessing an individual’s autonomy, encompassing tasks such as eating, dressing, and moving around, among others. Predicting these activities is part of health monitoring, elderly care, and intelligent systems, improving quality of life, and facilitating early dependency detec...

Background/Objectives: Health and social care systems around the globe are currently undergoing a transformation towards personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision medicine (5PM), considering the individual health status, conditions, genetic and genomic dispositions, etc., in personal, social, occupational, environmental, and beh...

Digital transformation is widely understood as a process where technology is used to modify an organization’s products and services and to create new ones. It is rapidly advancing in all sectors of society. Researchers have shown that it is a multidimensional process determined by human decisions based on ideologies, ideas, beliefs, goals, and the...

UNSTRUCTURED Digital transformation is widely understood as a process where technology is used to modify an organization’s products and services and to create new ones. It is rapidly advancing in all sectors of society. Researchers have shown that it is a multidimensional process determined by human decisions based on ideologies, ideas, beliefs, go...

This Special Issue of the Journal of Personalized Medicine presents extended versions of selected contributions to pHealth 2022, the 19th International Conference on Wearable Micro and Nano Technologies for Personalized Health, held on 8–10 November 2022 in Oslo, Norway [...]

This publication has always been a cornerstone of our community, providing valuable insights, updates, and a platform for sharing the incredible work of our members. It was initiated during the EFMI presidency of Catherine Chronaki (Belgium, Greece), with our enthusiastic colleague, Izet Masic (Bosnia Herzegovina), serving as the first Editor-in-Ch...

Communication and cooperation are fundamental for the correct deployment of P5 medicine, and this can be achieved only by correct comprehension of semantics so that it can aspire to medical knowledge sharing. There is a hierarchy in the operations that need to be performed to achieve this goal that brings to the forefront the complete understanding...

Health and social care systems around the globe currently undergo a transformation towards personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision medicine (5PM), considering the individual health status, conditions, genetic and genomic dispositions, etc., in personal, social, occupational, environmental and behavioral context. This transform...

The evolution of Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD) represents a major shift in healthcare, fueled by technological progress. The advent of PGHD, with technologies such as wearable devices and home monitoring systems, extends data collection beyond clinical environments, enabling continuous monitoring and patient engagement in their health manage...

The advancement of sciences and technologies, economic challenges, increasing expectations, and consumerism result in a radical transformation of health and social care around the globe, characterized by foundational organizational, methodological, and technological paradigm changes. The transformation of the health and social care ecosystems aims...

This Special Issue of the Journal of Personalized Medicine presents extended versions of selected contributions to pHealth 2021, the 18th International Conference on Wearable Micro and Nano Technologies for Personalized Health, held on 8–10 November 2021 in Genoa, Italy [...]

The ongoing transformation of health systems around the world aims at personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision medicine, supported by technology. It considers individual health status, conditions, and genetic and genomic dispositions in personal, social, occupational, environmental and behavioral contexts. In this way, it trans...

In Colombia, the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed on 6 March 2020. On 13 March 2023, Colombia registered 6,360,780 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19, representing 12.18% of the total population. The National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) in Colombia published in 2020 a COVID-19 vulnerability index, which estimates the vulner...

Modern pHealth is an emerging approach to collecting and using personal health information (PHI) for personalized healthcare and personalized health management. For its products and services, it deploys advanced technologies such as sensors, actuators, computers, mobile phones, etc. Researchers have shown that today’s networked information systems,...

This paper provides an overview of current linguistic and ontological challenges which have to be met in order to provide full support to the transformation of health ecosystems in order to meet precision medicine (5 PM) standards. It highlights both standardization and interoperability aspects regarding formal, controlled representations of clinic...

Background Recent studies demonstrate the potential of Artificial Intelligence to support diagnosis, mortality assessment, and clinical decisions in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). However, explicit evidence of strategies to overcome the particular challenges for transformed health systems in these countries does not exist. Objective The...

From beginning to today, pHealth has been a data driven service that collects and uses personal health information (PHI) for personal health services and personalized healthcare. As a result, pHealth services use intensively ICT technology, sensors, computers and mathematical algorithms. In past, pHealth applications were focused to certain health...

Health and social care ecosystems are currently a matter of foundational organizational, methodological and technological paradigm changes towards personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision (5P) medicine. For designing and implementing such advanced ecosystems, an understanding and correct representation of structure, function an...

The advancement of healthcare towards P5 medicine requires communication and cooperation between all actors and institutions involved. Interoperability must go beyond integrating data from different sources and include the understanding of the meaning of the data in the context of concepts and contexts they represent for a specific use case. In oth...

Machine learning has been proven to provide good performances on stress detection tasks using multi-modal sensor data from a smartwatch. Generally, machine learning techniques need a sufficient amount of data to train a robust model. Thus, we need to collect data from several users and send them to a central server to feed the algorithm. However, t...

The Italian “Istituto Superiore di Sanità” (ISS) identifies hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) as the most frequent and serious complications in healthcare. HAIs constitute a real health emergency and, therefore, require decisive action from both local and national health organizations. Information about the causative microorganisms of HAIs is obt...

In this paper, we propose a health data sharing infrastructure which aims to empower a democratic health data sharing ecosystem. Our project, named Health Democratization (HD), aims at enabling seamless mobility of health data across trust boundaries through addressing structural and functional challenges of its underlying infrastructure with the c...

Information systems are a complex thing, and they are mostly not used stand-alone anymore. In that context, many different issues must be considered. It starts with defining the system's purpose, includes the use cases and scenarios in combination with the necessary data ideally separated into distinct domains. Furthermore, it requires the selectio...

To improve patient outcomes after trauma, the need to decrypt the post-traumatic immune response has been identified. One prerequisite to drive advancement in understanding that domain is the implementation of surgical biobanks. This paper focuses on the outcomes of patients with one of two diagnoses: post-traumatic arthritis and osteomyelitis. In...

The SARS-CoV-2 health emergency has demonstrated the need for developing structured telemedicine systems to protect citizens from the spread of the virus. Thereby, their importance and the necessity to tailor their diffusion at large scale for providing services both at a distance and in time has been shown. For these reasons, the European Union ad...

The use of eHealth and healthcare services are becoming increasingly common across networks and ecosystems. Identifying the quality and health impact of these services is a big problem that in many cases it is difficult determine. Health ecosystems are seldom designed with privacy and trust in mind, and the service user has almost no way of knowing...

A transformed health ecosystem is a multi-stakeholder coalition that collects, stores, and shares personal health information (PHI) for different purposes, such as for personalized care, prevention, health prediction, precise medicine, personal health management, and public health purposes. Those services are data driven, and a lot of PHI is needed...

Objective For realizing pervasive and ubiquitous health and social care services in a safe and high quality as well as efficient and effective way, health and social care systems have to meet new organizational, methodological, and technological paradigms. The resulting ecosystems are highly complex, highly distributed, and highly dynamic, followin...

For meeting the challenge of aging, multi-diseased societies, cost containment, workforce development and consumerism by improved care quality and patient safety as well as more effective and efficient care processes, health and social care systems around the globe undergo an organizational, methodological and technological transformation towards p...

The wide-spread use of Common Data Models and information models in biomedical informatics encourages assumptions that those models could provide the entirety of what is needed for knowledge representation purposes. Based on the lack of computable semantics in frequently used Common Data Models, there appears to be a gap between knowledge represent...

pHealth is a data (personal health information) driven approach that use communication networks and platforms as technical base. Often it’ services take place in distributed multi-stakeholder environment. Typical pHealth services for the user are personalized information and recommendations how to manage specific health problems and how to behave h...

The paper discusses requirements and solutions for design and management of transformed health ecosystems. After introducing related definitions with reference to the transformation of health to P5 medicine, basics on systems, knowledge representation and management as well as system development processes and their formal representation/modelling f...

The value of data models in general and information models in specific has been evaluated by many scientific papers. UML as one modelling notation has documented its value as a foundation for precise specifications. Analyzing implementation guides for data exchange, they rarely include or are based on information models but simple data sets, if at...

Multidisciplinary and highly dynamic pHealth ecosystems according to the 5P Medicine paradigm require careful consideration of systems integration and interoperability within the domains knowledge space. The paper addresses the different aspects or levels of knowledge representation (KR) and management (KM) from cognitive theories (theories of know...

Today's digital information systems and applications collect every day a huge amount of personal health information (PHI) from sensor and surveillance systems, and every time we use personal computers or mobile phones. Collected data is processed in clouds, platforms and ecosystems by digital algorithms and machine learning. Pervasive technology, i...

The paper introduces a structured approach to transforming healthcare towards personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision (P5) medicine and the related organizational, methodological and technological requirements. Thereby, the deployment of autonomous systems and artificial intelligence is inevitably. The paper discusses opportun...

Processes like the care of type 2 diabetes mellitus patients require support by information systems considering the heterogeneity of the actors from different domains involved, enabling harmonization and integration of their specific methodologies and knowledge representation approaches towards interdisciplinary cooperation. Currently, the developm...

Digital health information systems (DHIS) are increasingly members of ecosystems, collecting, using and sharing a huge amount of personal health information (PHI), frequently without control and authorization through the data subject. From the data subject’s perspective, there is frequently no guarantee and therefore no trust that PHI is processed...

Health systems advance towards personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision (5P) medicine, considering the individual's health status, contexts and conditions. This results in fully distributed, highly dynamic, highly complex business systems and processes with multiple, comprehensively cooperating actors from different specialty a...

For improving quality and safety of healthcare as well as efficiency and efficacy of care processes, health systems turn toward personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision medicine. The related pHealth ecosystem combines different domains represented by a huge variety of different human and non-human actors belonging to different...

The paper introduces a structured approach to transforming healthcare towards personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision (P5) medicine. It highlights the promising methodological paradigm changes, accompanied by related organizational and technological ones. In the latter context, the deployment of artificial intelligence and aut...

The penetration of digital platforms and ecosystem based business-model together with the use algorithm and machine leaning are changing the environment where pHealth takes place. Traditional pHealth is changing to Digital pHealth. This development brings new ethical, privacy and trust problems which have to solve to make Digital pHealth successful...

Within a healthcare environment, organizational, legal, functional, social, ethical, and technical requirements must be met. In that context, security and safety are important challenges, which highly influence user acceptance. In such a complex scenario, privilege management and access control are critical for data security and patients' privacy....

Within a healthcare environment, organizational, legal, functional, social, ethical, and technical requirements must be met. In that context, security and safety are important challenges, which highly influence user acceptance. In such a complex scenario, privilege management and access control are critical for data security and patients' privacy....

The paper introduces a structured approach to transforming healthcare towards personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision (P5) medicine. It highlights the promising methodological paradigm changes, accompanied by related organizational and technological ones. In the latter context, the deployment of artificial intelligence and aut...

The penetration of digital platforms and ecosystem based business-model together with the use algorithm and machine leaning are changing the environment where pHealth takes place. Traditional pHealth is changing to Digital pHealth. This development brings new ethical, privacy and trust problems which have to solve to make Digital pHealth successful...

Progressive health paradigms, involving many different disciplines and combining multiple policy domains, requires advanced interoperability solutions. This results in special challenges for modeling health systems. The paper discusses classification systems for data models and enterprise business architectures and compares them with the ISO Refere...

In the biomedical domain, there exist a number of common data models (CDM) that have experienced wide uptake. However, none of these has emerged as the common model. Recently, the demand for integrating and analyzing increasingly large data sets in clinical and translational research has led to numerous efforts to harmonize existing CDMs and integr...

A pHealth ecosystem is a community of service users and providers. It is also a dynamic socio-technical system. One of its main goals is to help users to maintain their personal health status. Another goal is to give economic benefit to stakeholders which use personal health information existing in the ecosystem. In pHealth ecosystems, a huge amoun...

Complex ecosystems like the pHealth one combine different domains represented by a huge variety of different actors (human beings, organizations, devices, applications, components) belonging to different policy domains, coming from different disciplines, deploying different methodologies, terminologies, and ontologies, offering different levels of...

In Germany, vendors in cooperation with the responsible institutes have developed a powerful mechanism to supply data for medical quality assurance and control to public health agencies. However, this mechanism is proprietary and limited in some regards. On the other hand, it provides the necessary requirements worth being analyzed so that the shor...

Progressive health paradigms, involving many different disciplines and combining multiple policy domains, requires advanced interoperability solutions. This results in special challenges for modeling health systems. The paper discusses classification systems for data models and enterprise business architectures and compares them with the ISO Refere...

Complex ecosystems like the pHealth one combine different domains represented by a huge variety of different actors (human beings, organizations, devices, applications, components) belonging to different policy domains, coming from different disciplines, deploying different methodologies, terminologies, and ontologies, offering different levels of...

In the biomedical domain, there exist a number of common data models (CDM) that have experienced wide uptake. However, none of these has emerged as the common model. Recently, the demand for integrating and analyzing increasingly large data sets in clinical and translational research has led to numerous efforts to harmonize existing CDMs and integr...

A pHealth ecosystem is a community of service users and providers. It is also a dynamic socio-technical system. One of its main goals is to help users to maintain their personal health status. Another goal is to give economic benefit to stakeholders which use personal health information existing in the ecosystem. In pHealth ecosystems, a huge amoun...

Contains the proceedings of the 14th pHealth conference, held at TU/e Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Advanced health and social services paradigms are supported by a comprehensive set of domains managed by different scientific disciplines. Interoperability has to evolve beyond information and communication technology (ICT) concerns, including the real world business domains and their processes, but also the individual context of all actors involve...

Successful health care, eHealth, digital health, and personal health systems increasingly take place in cross-jurisdictional, dynamic and risk-encumbered information space. They require rich amount of personal health information (PHI). Trust is and will be the cornerstone and prerequisite for successful health services. In global environments, trus...

Background: In recent years, the interest in user experience (UX) evaluation methods for assessing technology solutions, especially in health systems for children with special needs like cognitive disabilities, has increased. Objective: Conduct a systematic mapping study to provide an overview in the field of UX evaluations in rehabilitation vid...

Organizational, methodological and technological paradigm changes enable a precise, personalized, predictive, preventive and participative approach to health and social services supported by multiple actors from different domains at diverse level of knowledge and skills. Interoperability has to advance beyond Information and Communication Technolog...

Using communication standards is normally combined with the expectation that interfaces implementing them are interoperable. This paper examines why this is not the case and what must be done to overcome this problem. It ends with a conclusion and recommendations for future developments.

Recommender systems (RS) are useful tools for filtering and sorting items and information for users. There is a wide diversity of approaches that help creating personalized recommendations. Context-aware recommender systems (CARS) are a kind of RS which provide adaptation capabilities to the user's environment, e.g., by sensing data through wearabl...

Trust is a social code and glue between persons and organizations in any business domain including health. pHealth is a complex concept that is built around health service providers, individuals and artefacts such as sensors, mobile devices, networks, computers, and software applications. It has many stakeholders such as organizations, persons, pat...

Recommender systems (RS) are useful tools for filtering and sorting items and information for users. There is a wide diversity of approaches that help creating personalized recommendations. Context-aware recommender systems (CARS) are a kind of RS which provide adaptation capabilities to the user's environment, e.g., by sensing data through wearabl...

Using communication standards is normally combined with the expectation that interfaces implementing them are interoperable. This paper examines why this is not the case and what must be done to overcome this problem. It ends with a conclusion and recommendations for future developments.

Successful health care, eHealth, digital health, and personal health systems increasingly take place in cross-jurisdictional, dynamic and risk-encumbered information space. They require rich amount of personal health information (PHI). Trust is and will be the cornerstone and prerequisite for successful health services. In global environments, trus...

Trust is a social code and glue between persons and organizations in any business domain including health. pHealth is a complex concept that is built around health service providers, individuals and artefacts such as sensors, mobile devices, networks, computers, and software applications. It has many stakeholders such as organizations, persons, pat...

Organizational, methodological and technological paradigm changes enable a precise, personalized, predictive, preventive and participative approach to health and social services supported by multiple actors from different domains at diverse level of knowledge and skills. Interoperability has to advance beyond Information and Communication Technolog...

The evolution of the Internet has provided new and more efficient communication and collaboration channels between individuals, empowering them to share health information and to interact more and more using social media channels. Information quality is frequently identified as one of the main limitations of social media in healthcare. The objectiv...

Established and emerging organizational, methodological and technological paradigm changes health systems around the world are faced with, dramatically impact the administrative, legal and social framework as well as processes of, but also roles and responsibilities of actors involved in, health services delivery. Security, privacy and trust are ma...

Background: Stress-related disorders have become one of the main health problems in many countries and organizations worldwide. They can generate depression and anxiety, and could derive in work absenteeism and reduction in productivity. Objective: Design, develop, and evaluate an mHealth App for the prevention of Burnout Syndrome following the...

Popular data exchange standards facilitate the use of vocabulary in different ways. Quite often, the usage is based on, and in favor of, simple implementations not considering reality. In most cases the vocabulary is assembled in form of simple code lists. Well-known bad practice is neither to define proper concept descriptions for the individual c...

Problem: Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the number one cause of death globally. The World Health Organization estimated that 80% of the deaths caused by CVD take place in low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Objective: This paper describes the development of a mobile Electrocardiogram (ECG) system designed to support the evaluation of card...

Problem: Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the number one cause of death globally. The World Health Organization estimated that 80% of the deaths caused by CVD take place in low and middle-income countries (LMIC).

Popular data exchange standards facilitate the use of vocabulary in different ways. Quite often, the usage is based on, and in favor of, simple implementations not considering reality. In most cases the vocabulary is assembled in form of simple code lists. Well-known bad practice is neither to define proper concept descriptions for the individual c...

Background: Stress-related disorders have become one of the main health problems in many countries and organizations worldwide. They can generate depression and anxiety, and could derive in work absenteeism and reduction in productivity.

Like no other area, health and social care are characterized by a multi-disciplinary nature. This development gets even stronger by the move towards a personalized, predictive, preventive and participative care paradigm as well as by organizational and technological changes leading to highly distributed care setting realized by multiple stakeholder...

Health is wide concept covering a person's physical, mental and social well-being. Traditionally, regulated healthcare has been the main source for curative and preventive service offered to patients. Healthcare is in transition, however. Paradigms such as patient empowerment and patient in the centre as well as in-home care service are changing pr...

The paradigm changes health systems are faced with result in highly complex and distributed systems requiring flexibility, autonomy, but first of all advanced interoperability. In that context, understanding the architecture of the system to be supported as well as the process to meet the intended business objectives is crucial. Unfortunately, ther...

Recent studies demonstrate the potential of Mobile Health (mHealth) to improve quality of care and efficiency in low- and middle- income countries (LMIC). However, strong evidence of their impact, especially in large scale projects is still missing. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview about the current status of mHealth in LMIC, a...

The development of software supporting inter-disciplinary systems like the type 2 diabetes mellitus care requires the deployment of methodologies designed for this type of interoperability. The GCM framework allows the architectural description of such systems and the development of software solutions based on it. A first step of the GCM methodolog...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the number one cause of death globally. According to WHO (World Health Organization), 80% of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. CVDs are associated to risk factors such as obesity, smoking, sedentary lifestyle, and others. The scientific community keeps searching for new parameters, like ECG si...

Public health programs must be based on the real health needs of the population. However, the design of efficient and effective public health programs is subject to availability of information that can allow users to identify, at the right time, the health issues that require special attention. The objective of this paper is to propose a case-based...

Chronic diseases such as Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) constitute a big burden to the global health economy. T2DM Care Management requires a multi-disciplinary and multi-organizational approach. Because of different languages and terminologies, education, experiences, skills, etc., such an approach establishes a special interoperability challenge...

Burnout is scientifically a work related syndrome which consists of three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced professional efficacy. Different instruments for the diagnosis of burnout exist, accompanied by many associated problems, however. This paper describes a proposal aiming at supporting the diagnosis of burnout usi...