Giuseppe Fico

• Phd Biomedical Engineering
• Professor (Assistant) at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

The BEAMER Adherence Intelligence Visualization Platform (AIVP) is a digital health tool designed to support healthcare professionals in managing patient adherence to treatment. This preliminary study evaluates the platform's usability, acceptance, and trust among healthcare professionals and researchers using a mixed-methods approach. Data were co...

Background: Treatment non-adherence of patients stands as a major barrier to effectively manage chronic conditions. However, non-adherent behavior is estimated to affect up to 50 % of patients with chronic conditions, leading to poorer health outcomes among patients, higher rates of hospitalization, and increased mortality. Objective: This study of...

The European Health Data Space (EHDS) is a significant initiative within the European Union aimed at improving healthcare through better use of health data and collaboration. This involves sharing and utilization of health data in a secure and interoperable manner across EU member states. With the advent of modern technology, different types of hea...

Background Conditional outcomes are outcomes defined only under specific circumstances. For example, future quality of life can only be ascertained when subjects are alive. In prognostic models involving conditional outcomes, a choice must be made on the precise target of prediction: one could target future quality of life, given that the individua...

Background: The development of Artificial Intelligence in the healthcare sector is generating a great impact. However, one of the primary challenges for the implementation of this technology is the access to high-quality data due to issues in data collection and regulatory constraints, for which synthetic data is an emerging alternative. While prev...

Healthcare services and products are rapidly changing due to the development of new technologies, offering relevant solutions to improve patient outcomes. Patient-Generated Health Data and knowledge-sharing across the European Union (EU) has a great potential of making healthcare provision more effective and efficient by putting the patient at the...

Head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCC) are aggressive and heterogenous tumors with a high fatality rate. Many gene signatures (GS) have been developed with both prognostic and predictive significance. We aimed to externally validate five published GS in a large European collection of HNSCC patients. Gene expression from 1097 treatment-naïve...

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the healthcare sector is generating a great impact. However, one of the primary challenges for the implementation of this technology is the access to high-quality data due to issues in data collection and regulatory constraints, for which synthetic data is an emerging alternative. This Scoping revi...

Background Treatment non-adherence of patients stands as a major barrier to effectively manage chronic conditions. Treatment adherence can be described as the extent to which a patient’s behavior of taking medications follows the agreed recommendations from the healthcare provider. However, non-adherent behavior is estimated to affect up to 50% of...

Adherence to medication is a critical aspect of healthcare with a significant impact on patient outcomes. This has led to the elaboration of several studies over the years to understand adherence better, evolving to the point of applying Machine Learning techniques, whether to study the relationship of different factors with adherence or to make pr...

This manuscript presents a parallel among important EU legal frameworks, such as the Medical Device Regulations and General Data Protection Regulation and economic-historical challenges faced by European citizens. This parallel offers a prospective for understanding the direction taken by policymakers for forthcoming regulations, such as the Europe...

Background Healthy lifestyle interventions have a positive impact on multiple disease trajectories, including cancer-related outcomes. Specifically, appropriate habitual physical activity, adequate sleep, and a regular wholesome diet are of paramount importance for the wellness and supportive care of survivors of cancer. Mobile health (mHealth) app...

This paper examines the ethical and legal challenges encountered during the GATEKEEPER Project and how these challenges informed the development of a comprehensive framework for future Large-Scale Pilot (LSP) projects. GATEKEEPER is a LSP Project with 48 partners conducting 30 implementation studies across Europe with 50,000 target participants gro...

Digital transformation has a great effect on industries but also in the perception of their products with high consequences on society as a whole, as driver for innovation. However, there are still many barriers to the adoption of digital technologies, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In the present study we propose a new so...

Background: Cancer is progressively becoming the most prevalent disease worldwide, accompanied by significantly increasing investments in research to improve its prevention, early detection, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Predictive analytics are showing promising performance when applied to these tasks, with recent reporting guidelines suppor...

The COVID-19 pandemic, a period of great turmoil, was coupled with the emergence of an “infodemic”, a state when the public was bombarded with vast amounts of unverified information from dubious sources that led to a chaotic information landscape. The excessive flow of messages to citizens, combined with the justified fear and uncertainty imposed b...

Background: The Big Data for Quality of Life (BD4QoL) study investigates quality of life (QoL) in head and neck cancer (HNC) survivors, focusing on survivorship and characterizing survivor demographics. Methods: We screened data from 5 studies across Europe (N=7276) and included patients with a diagnosis of squamous cell carcinoma (oral cavity, hyp...

The European Project GATEKEEPER aims to develop a platform and marketplace to ensure a healthier independent life for the aging population. In this platform the role of HL7 FHIR is to provide a shared logical data model to collect data in heterogeneous living, which can be used by AI Service and the Gatekeeper HL7 FHIR Implementation Guide was crea...

A better understanding of patients' adherence to treatment is a prerequisite to maximize the benefit of healthcare provision for patients, reduce treatment costs, and is a key factor in a variety of subsequent health outcomes. We aim to understand the state of the art of scientific evidence about which factors influence patients' adherence to treat...

Rare cancers are a significant public health challenge due to their low incidence and complex nature, resulting in limited knowledge and resources for patient care and research. To address this issue, we present a Rare Cancer Data Ecosystem that enables the re-use of existing health data sources for rare cancers across European healthcare systems....

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social networks were flooded with overwhelming information. This study focused on the interaction between science and society as this took place via Twitter. State of the art algorithmic sentiment analysis was employed to examine the communication between pharmaceutical companies and the public, to analyze the profile...

The literature defines transitional care as the coordination and continuity of care during the transition from one health care setting to another or to home. Referred to as transition of care, between health care professionals and settings, as their condition and care needs change during the course of a chronic illness, acute illness or acute admis...

Introduction The International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering created a multidisciplinary working group to discuss assessments of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) applications in health care. Engineers, clinicians, and economists identified evidence generation as a critical topic. Heart failure (HF) was selecte...

Background Patients with polypharmacy suffer from complex medical conditions involving a large healthcare burden. This study aimed to describe the characteristics and utilization of primary care (PC) and hospital care (HC) and factors associated in chronic patients with polypharmacy, stratifying by adjusted morbidity groups (AMG) risk level, sex an...

In the context of healthcare, the advancement of information and communication technologies (ICTs) serves as a baseline for innovations that facilitate information exchange between healthcare providers, patients, and communities, enabling the diagnosis of diseases in the early stages and further reducing healthcare costs. The concept of eHealth is...

Telemedicine can provide benefits in patient affected by chronic diseases or elderly citizens as part of standard routine care supported by digital health. The GATEKEEPER (GK) Project was financed to create a vendor independent platform to be adopted in medical practice and to demonstrate its effect, benefit value, and scalability in 8 connected me...

Eating disorders represent a significant global health concern, characterized by high prevalence and profound repercussions for affected individuals. However, the timely identification of these disorders is impeded by the current reliance on time-consuming questionnaires as diagnostic tools. This article aims to outline the development of a Natural...

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are playing increasingly important roles, permeating the field of medical devices (MDs). This rapid progress has not yet been matched by the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) process, which still needs to define a common methodology for assessing AI/ML-based MDs. To collect existing evidence fro...

BACKGROUND Healthy lifestyle interventions have a positive impact on multiple disease trajectories, including cancer-related outcomes. Specifically, appropriate habitual physical activity, adequate sleep, and a regular wholesome diet are of paramount importance for the wellness and supportive care of survivors of cancer. Mobile health (mHealth) app...

Indoor air quality monitoring is vital for ensuring high-quality healthcare services and minimizing the presence of harmful pollutants and environmental factors that could potentially impact on the well-being of individuals in hospitals. To address this need, the authors developed the Transparent Robot (TR), an integrated sensorized platform design...

Introduction In the process of growing societies, and especially in the digital era we live in, there is a need for a strong push for innovation that puts citizens at the center of the process from the beginning to build more resilient, cooperative and flexible communities. Different collaborative design approaches have emerged in recent decades, o...

Unlabelled: Purpose We aim to evaluate the diagnostic performance of the SleepImage Ring device in identifying obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) across different severity in comparison to standard polysomnography (PSG). Methods Thirty-nine patients (mean age, 56.8 ± 15.0 years; 29 [74.3%] males) were measured with the SleepImage Ring and PSG study sim...

Purpose This study evaluates the effects of non-invasive home telemonitoring methods of managing congestive heart failure (CHF) patients with particular focus on complexity of intervention, patient characteristics, patient severity, and key enabling technologies (KETs) adopted. Our goal was to capture all possible aspects of previously documented o...

The GATEKEEPER (GK) Project was financed by the European Commission to develop a platform and marketplace to share and match ideas, technologies, user needs and processes to ensure a healthier independent life for the aging population connecting all the actors involved in the care circle. In this paper, the GK platform architecture is presented foc...

Background: The World Health Organization's strategy toward healthy aging fosters person-centered integrated care sustained by eHealth systems. However, there is a need for standardized frameworks or platforms accommodating and interconnecting multiple of these systems while ensuring secure, relevant, fair, trust-based data sharing and use. The H2...

Abstract Age‐related changes in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, multimorbidity, frailty, and cognitive impairment represent challenges for drug treatments. Moreover, older adults are commonly exposed to polypharmacy, leading to increased risk of drug interactions and related adverse events, and higher costs for the healthcare systems. Thus,...

Better understanding patients’ adherence to treatment is a prerequisite to maximize the benefit of healthcare care provision for patients, reduce treatment costs, and is a key factor in a variety of subsequent health outcomes. We aim to understand the state of the art of scientific evidence about which factors influence patients’ adherence to treat...

Hospitals need to optimize patient care, as, among other factors, life expectancy has increased due to improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and medicines. Hospitalization-at-home (HaH) could increase admission efficiency, moderate costs, and reduce the demand for beds. This study aimed to provide data on the feasibility, acceptability, and effect...

Patients surviving head and neck cancer (HNC) suffer from high physical, psychological, and socioeconomic burdens. Achieving cancer-free survival with an optimal quality of life (QoL) is the primary goal for HNC patient management. So, maintaining lifelong surveillance is critical. An ambitious goal would be to carry this out through the advanced a...

The healthcare environment is made up of highly complicated interactions between many technologies, activities, and people. Ensuring a solid communication between them is vital to ease the healthcare management. Semantic ontologies are knowledge representation tools that implement abstractions to fully describe a given topic in terms of subjects an...

Editorial on the Research Topic Highlights in connected health 2021/22 The devastating impact of Covid-19 has compelled the healthcare leaders around the world to revisit the current healthcare systems in terms of response to the crisis in the new post-pandemic reality. It requires the redesign of healthcare systems by introducing new care models t...

Drug treatment in elderly patients is a challenge for healthcare systems. This challenge is exacerbated by age-related changes in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, multimorbidity, frailty and cognitive impairment. Moreover, old patients are commonly exposed to polypharmacy, leading to increased risk of drug interactions, adverse drug reactions...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization’s strategy toward healthy aging fosters person-centered integrated care sustained by eHealth systems. However, there is a need for standardized frameworks or platforms accommodating and interconnecting multiple of these systems while ensuring secure, relevant, fair, trust-based data sharing and use. The H202...

Background: HNC survivors suffer from high physical, psychological and socioeconomic burdens. Achieving cancer-free survival with an optimal QoL is the primary goal for HNC patients (pts) management. Therefore, maintaining lifelong surveillance is critical. This can be carried out by advanced analysis of environmental, emotional and behavioral data...

IntroductionHigh levels of adoption and usage for the COVID Tracing Apps (CTA) among the population is a stipulated prerequisite for success of the implementation of these apps, aiming to mitigate the pandemic and track spreading of the virus more efficient and effectively. In the current study, the main objective was to investigate individuals' pr...

IoT technologies generate intelligence and connectivity and develop knowledge to be used in the decision-making process. However, research that uses big data through global interconnected infrastructures, such as the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) for Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA), is fraught with several ethical concerns. A large-scale application o...

Featured Application Applied Sciences—Special Issue on Semantic Interoperability and Applications in Healthcare, 2021. Abstract The World Health Organization and the American College of Sports Medicine have released guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behavior, as part of an effort to reduce inactivity worldwide. However, to date, there...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems using symptoms/signs to detect respiratory diseases may improve diagnosis especially in limited resource settings. Heterogeneity in such AI systems creates an ongoing need to analyse performance to inform future research. This systematic literature review aimed to investigate performance and reporting of diagnos...

Background Home hospitalization (HH) has demonstrated to be a cost-effective alternative with respect ti traditional hospitalization. Digital technologies, such as remote monitoring, have the potential to contribute to its expansion. Tailored educational content is a need to ensure patient safety during the whole admission. Purpose The objective o...

Head and neck cancer is the seventh most common cancer worldwide. The incidence of this cancer is increasing, but at the same time, the cancer-related mortality rate has decreased over time, leaving more head and neck cancer survivors. More emphasis is needed on quality-of-life research in the head and neck cancer field to improve their daily lives...

This paper describes the framework for the creation of a Living Labs network based on the experience of the setting up, growth and further consolidation of the European Living Labs and Test Beds Network focused on Health. The manuscript presents how to create an open innovation ecosystem through a network of Living Labs and Test Beds, introducing i...

Health education is essential for type 1 diabetic patients to actively participate in the decision-making process about their disease. Under the framework of the INCAP project, a mobile application has been designed and developed with an easy-to-use interface for type 1 diabetic patients to improve their empowerment, activation and thus their self-...

Pneumonia is a leading cause of mortality in limited resource settings (LRS), which are common in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Accurate referrals can reduce the devastating impact of pneumonia, especially in LRS. Discriminating pneumonia from other respiratory conditions based only on symptoms is a major challenge. Machine learning has...

Motivated by the aging trend, much effort is being invested into implementing ICT (Information and Communications Technology)-enabled systems to provide a better quality of life and support the independent living of older people. As a result, many systems, often labeled as eHealth or AAL (Ambient/Active Assisted Living), were developed over the yea...

In the last decade, smartphone users grown from 2.8 billion worldwide in 2018 to 3.8 billion in 2021. This fact associates with greater ease of publishing and accessing fake news. This is a particularly concerning issue in a global crisis situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic. As stated by the WHO, this is a global health crisis and the spread of...

The average life expectancy of the world’s population is increasing and the healthcare systems sooner than later will be compromised by its reduced capacity and its highly economic cost; in addition, the age distribution of the population is leading towards the older spectrum. This trend will lead to immeasurable and unexpected economic problems an...

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are already playing an important role in our daily activities as we use them and rely on them to increase our abilities, connectivity, productivity and quality of life. However, there are still obstacles to achieving a unique interface able to transfer full control to users given the diversity of protocols, pro...

Background: Despite advances in treatments, 30% to 50% of stage III-IV head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) patients relapse within 2 years after treatment. The Big Data to Decide (BD2Decide) project aimed to build a database for prognostic prediction modeling. Methods: Stage III-IV HNSCC patients with locoregionally advanced HNSCC trea...

PurposeHospitalization at Home (HaH) has proven to be more efficient and effective than conventional one, but it also requires a higher number of resources and specialised personnel. Information technologies can make this process scalable and allow physicians and nurses to deliver remote healthcare services for patients hospitalized at home. Howeve...

For many years, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) has been considered as a single entity. However, in the last decades HNSCC complexity and heterogeneity have been recognized. In parallel, high-throughput omics techniques had allowed picturing a larger spectrum of the behavior and characteristics of molecules in cancer and a large set o...

Cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide. In order to reduce this burden, new strategies need to be implemented. With the evolution of computational techniques, the amount of clinical data available has increased considerably. However, these data are not always easily accessible, with some barriers of different nature preventing their...

The value of technology to health care is not dependent on clinical and economic considerations alone. In this chapter we describe health related as well as economic, social, legal, ethical, and organizational criteria to include in early health technology assessment. Moreover, we provide recommendations on methods to collect data on these criteria...

Heterogeneity of people with diabetes makes maintaining blood glucose control and achieving therapy adherence a challenge. It is fundamental that patients get actively involved in the management of the disease in their living environments. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the use and acceptance of a self-management system for diabetes dev...

Europe is currently the oldest continent having the “old-age dependency ratio” - persons over 65 compared to the active population. To cope with this situation, the deployment of Active and Healthy Aging (AHA) services through IoT is becoming increasingly relevant, to make this population as independent as possible within their environment. This st...

Background: To understand user needs, system requirements and organizational conditions towards successful design and adoption of Clinical Decision Support Systems for Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) care built on top of computerized risk models. Methods: The holistic and evidence-based CEHRES Roadmap, used to create eHealth solutions through participator...

This article describes the procedure of definition and design of a process for the continuity care unit to improve the attention to the patient and his/her ecosystem providing a novel alternative to the conventional methods. This work was done under the framework of the MiniQ project, funded by EIT Health to improve the management of poly-medicated...

The ACTIVAGE project is a multi-center Large Scale Pilot that has as main objective the demonstration that the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm plays a fundamental role in deploying cost-effective and sustainable solutions for ageing well and independent living of European senior citizens. In this work, we present the approach that is currently ad...

Evaluating eHealth solutions to improve the management of Diabetes requires a multidimensional perspective but, at the same time, there is need to converge the different dimensions in order to make decisions towards further stages of innovation. The work described in this paper informs on how the results of a European funded project have been re-el...

Objective: To describe the development, as part of the European Union MOSAIC (Models and Simulation Techniques for Discovering Diabetes Influence Factors) project, of a dashboard-based system for the management of type 2 diabetes and assess its impact on clinical practice. Methods: The MOSAIC dashboard system is based on predictive modeling, lon...

Existing initiatives to improve physical, mental, and social condition of senior citizens, which in Europe fall under the name of Active and Healthy Ageing, are including technological paradigms as main driver for innovation uptake. Among these paradigms, Smart Cities and the Internet of Things are of utmost importance. However, these initiatives m...

Cualquier actividad y acción que realizamos puede ser cuantificable, y por lo tanto, genera datos. Y esos datos se convierten en informa-ción sobre distintos aspectos, como por ejemplo, los gustos y preferencias de las personas, sus relaciones familiares y amistosas, sus preocu-paciones y también su salud. Con la alta penetración de las tecnologías...