The Kick-Off Meeting of the 'Bravehealth project' was held in Rome in Palazzo Carpegna, on 8 March 2010. Subtitled 'At the heart of health', the event gathered  all the ehealth sector stakeholders, under the aegis of the European Commission.

Bravehealth is an integrated project co-funded by the European Commission with €7 million under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). 

An in depth analysis and discussion on the project in the presence of several Italian Telemedicine stakeholders took place during the meeting, as well as a discussion on all technical aspects of the kick-off with the companies and institutions involved.

The Bravehealth Project, otherwise known as 'Patient Centric Approach for an Integrated, Adaptive, Context Aware Remote Diagnosis and Management of Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD)', proposes a patient-centric vision to CVD management and treatment, providing people already diagnosed as subjects at risk with a sound solution for continuous and remote monitoring and real time prevention of malignant events.

The solution proposed will be made up of the following sub-systems:

• Wearable Unit: It is an innovative concept of a miniaturised multi-parameter sensor, able to continuously monitor the most critical parameters needed to perform a thorough diagnosis by means of specific diagnostic and prognostic algorithms. It will be possible to both perform a scheduled analysis of critical parameters but also to remotely trigger the screening of specific vital signs;
• Remote Management Unit: It represents the main interface between physicians and the system, providing both automated support, in the form of text messages with information or suggestions to the patient directly generated by the system, and doctor managed supervision, allowing direct communication with the patients with voice/text/chat messages. The most important added value of the this unit is the possibility to be interfaced with existing National Health Records and Physiological Data Banks in order to generate and verify risk prediction models using advanced data mining approaches;
• Life! Gateway: Data acquired by the wearable unit will be relayed to a gateway which represents the means by which the information passes from the user to the Central Supervision Unit.

The Central Supervision Unit will provide the user with the following functionalities:

• Real time communications: in case of pathological findings, or simply to suggest specific drugs to the patient, or to suggest a necessary action;
• Location aware information, exploiting the positioning capabilities of a Global Positioning System (GPS);
• Mobile virtual community for education and support.

The project consortium gathers 17 partners from Belgium, Finland, Italy, Poland, Portugal,  the United Kingdom and China.

Further Information:

• Kick off meeting announcement - San Camillo Forlanini Hospital (in Italian)
• Bravehealth Project