Peter Pharow’s research while affiliated with Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology and other places

Background Care and support of children with physical or mental disabilities are accompanied with serious concerns for parents, families, healthcare institutions, schools, and their communities. Recent studies and technological innovations have demonstrated the feasibility of providing therapy and rehabilitation services to children supported by computer games. Objective The aim of this paper is to present HapHop-Physio, an innovative computer game that combines exercise with fun and learning, developed to support cognitive therapies in children. Methods Conventional software engineering methods such as the Scrum methodology, a functionality test and a related usability test, were part of the comprehensive methodology adapted to develop HapHop-Physio. Results The game supports visual and auditory attention therapies, as well as visual and auditory memory activities. The game was developed by a multidisciplinary team, which was based on the Hopscotch® platform provided by Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT Institute in Germany, and designed in collaboration with a rehabilitation clinic in Colombia. HapHop-Physio was tested and evaluated to probe its functionality and user satisfaction. Conclusion The results show the development of an easy-to-use and funny game by a multidisciplinary team using state-of-the-art videogame technologies and software methodologies. Children testing the game concluded that they would like to play again while undergoing rehabilitation therapies.

Noise harms the environmental quality and can have negative effect on health and wellbeing. Providing silent areas and periods of rest is one way to improve the perceived environmental quality. However, realization is not easy in the day to day life. The usage of mHealth solutions which can provide information about the sound of a certain area and the respective effect on humans could be supportive. As the perception of sound is highly subjective, the prediction of the perceived acoustic environments is very difficult. This paper describes a course of action to develop an automatic estimation of an acoustic environment, based on the measurement of sound properties solely. The challenges of this endeavor are explained in detail. Possible application areas in mHealth are identified and presented. This future vision paper wants to draw the attention to different possibilities to cope with noise pollution either by personal behavior change or by using personalized data to reach out for a more general applicability for example through soundscape.

Personal portable devices have already gained their position in health services. However, mobile technologies and Internet of Things open new areas of applications. The possibility to collect many data types continuously over long time intervals brings various questions that must be answered in the design process. We also discuss briefly the role of the user. We illustrate the complexity of the field by a case study of diabetes management.

Mobile technologies are constantly evolving and with the development of Internet of Things we can expect continuous increase of various applications. Mobile technologies have undeniable opportunities to play an important role in health services. Concerning purely technical aspects, almost every problem can be solved. However, there are still many unsolved and unclear issues related with ethics and governance mechanisms for mobile phone applications. These issues are even more critical in medical and health care applications of mobile technologies. This paper tries to analyse ethical, and privacy-related challenges that may occur when introducing Personal Portable Devices (PPD) to collect and record personal health data in health care and welfare environment.

Modern personal portable health devices (PPDs) become increasingly part of a larger, inhomogeneous information system. Information collected by sensors are stored and processed in global clouds. Services are often free of charge, but at the same time service providers' business model is based on the disclosure of users' intimate health information. Health data processed in PPD networks is not regulated by health care specific legislation. In PPD networks, there is no guarantee that stakeholders share same ethical principles with the user. Often service providers have own security and privacy policies and they rarely offer to the user possibilities to define own, or adapt existing privacy policies. This all raises huge ethical and privacy concerns. In this paper, the authors have analyzed privacy challenges in PPD networks from users' viewpoint using system modeling method and propose the principle "Personal Health Data under Personal Control" must generally be accepted at global level. Among possible implementation of this principle, the authors propose encryption, computer understandable privacy policies, and privacy labels or trust based privacy management methods. The latter can be realized using infrastructural trust calculation and monitoring service. A first step is to require the protection of personal health information and the principle proposed being internationally mandatory. This requires both regulatory and standardization activities, and the availability of open and certified software application which all service providers can implement. One of those applications should be the independent Trust verifier.

In theory, persons with impairments including elderly have the same rights of taking part in everyday life activities and society. However in practice, they are at risk of being excluded because of the great number of ICT solutions not addressing the needs of people with impairments. This paper describes a system which provides personalized services supporting people with impairments and patients travelling for medical reasons, work, social contacts, daily outdoor life activities, etc. In this paper, the authors focus on the scenarios, requirements, architecture, integration, requirements fulfillment, and conclusions of building an ambient intelligent travel companions.

Mobile devices are becoming more and more important for services offered either directly to individuals, or indirectly as part of a therapeutic or rehabilitation procedure. Representing the work of the EFMI WG "Personal Portable Devices", this paper offers an introduction to some of the most important technical and privacy-related challenges that arise when introducing mobile sensor or actuator devices (and networks) into health care, wellness, and fitness processes in order to exploit their capability to collect, record and process personal health data. Data processing can be viewed in three classes of application, namely processes for recommendations, decision support and decision making in personalized health and wellbeing service provision. This paper therefore briefly addresses aspects such as the Medical Device Directive for certifying devices in that respect. But regardless whether being MDD-compliant or not, each class of devices may have its own benefits and weaknesses in terms of enabling health-related personalized decisions.

This paper provides an introduction to some of the most important challenges that may occur when introducing the principle of Personal Portable Devices for providing information in terms of Big Data on the one hand, and the concept of the Virtual Physiological Human on the other. Both concepts can be applied to exploit their specific capability to collect and record personal health data of different levels of granularity into processes of personalized health service provision. The paper thus analyzes Big Data approaches and their capability to provide information for personalized service provision, and the same goes for the Virtual Physiological Human as such. But it is not only devices, concepts, models, and strategies that are involved in personalized health care as well as welfare and wellness service provision to human beings - it is the human being himself, too. This paper addresses technological and methodological aspects of using large amounts of data whereas another paper submitted to this conference will bring forward the aspects of applied sensor and device technology in relation to decision support and decision making for pHealth services.

In theory, persons with impairments including elderly have the same rights of taking part in everyday life activities and society. However in practice, they are at risk of being excluded because of the great number of ICT solutions not addressing the needs of people with impairments. This paper describes a system which provides personalized services supporting people with impairments and patients travelling for medical reasons, work, social contacts, daily outdoor life activities, etc. In this paper, we focus on the scenarios, requirements, architecture, integration, requirements fulfilment, and conclusions of building an ambient intelligent travel companions.