Ticuro Reply, the new frontier in Telemedicine
Matteo Ciprian is a student in Telecommunication Engineering at University of Padua 🎓 and he is currently working as an intern for Healthy Reply, which is specialised in Telemedicine and Digital Healthcare. The project he is focusing on is a module of Ticuro Reply, a digital platform created by Healthy to allow medical and behavioral monitoring in IoT and IoMT environment. Specifically, he involved in “Elderly Care project”.
Hi Matteo, thank you for having joined us today! 😀How did you get passionate about Digital Healthcare?
Hi all, thank you for having invited and introduced me! I have always been fascinated by the applications of technology in life sciences, especially in healthcare. My academic background is focused on Internet of Things and Signal Processing, which it can be summed-up as “coming up with a way to transmit and to get information through sensors”. This is basically the goal of Telemedicine ⚕️.
Moreover, working in this field gives me the opportunity of exploiting my knowledge and my skills for a direct improvement of someone else’s life. On some level, this can be seen as an ethical reason.
Tell us something more about the project you are working on.
My project deals with Behavioural Monitoring of patients in a smart home scenario. In a nutshell, Healthy Reply has installed a set of movement and environmental sensors in patients’ houses in order to check the presence of the person in a specific location at a specific time. For example, we can see how much time the patient spent in bathroom 🛀, or if it has recently opened the door or the fridge.
What I am trying to do is developing a software based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to use this information to “trace” the everyday behaviour of the patient. So that, when the detected behaviour deviates too much from the usual pattern, we are able to spot an anomaly.
What are the benefits 💪 that this project brings to everyday life?
The main idea behind this project is the following. When the software detects an anomaly, it launches an alarm to Ticuro, which advises an external operator about what is happening. This way, elderly patients can be permanently monitored and it is then possible to notice unusual behaviours, maybe triggered by an anomalous event such as a fall, loss of consciousness or other health problems.
In any case, the very innovative aspect lies in the fact that this algorithm completely adapts to the patient, so it is expected to be more robust to false alarms than other types of “anomaly detectors” developed in the past.
Not least, we are able to monitor them without cameras or other visual device, only using environmental sensors with lower impact on patient’s privacy.
What’s the future of your topic?
According to World Health Organisation, the world population aged 60 and older is expected to count more than 2 billion people by 2050. Looking at this data, it is possible to forecast that healthcare technologies, especially in elderly care, will gain momentum in the next 20 years. For what concerns my project, I think Artificial Intelligence can greatly contribute in advancing health and behavioural monitoring for its potentiality to easily adapt, in this case, to the patient. On the other hand, these “new” techniques need a considerable amount of data to work properly: this could be a possible “bottle neck”.
Your ✌️cents for the student who’s reading
From a technical point of view, I have few tips.
I would suggest you taking a Machine Learning/ Statistical Learning course because it is a fundamental step if you want to work on this field. In case you have not the opportunity to study these topics at the university, don’t worry, you can easily follow an online course too. Personally, I like the one offered by Stanford University, but there are many others published on websites such as Coursera or YouTube.
From a practical point of view, I think that learning Python 🐍 is essential nowadays. Basically, 95% of the tools used in Machine Learning are implemented in this programming language.
What have you been learning since you work for Reply?
Many things, of course. 😉 From a technical point of view, I learned how a real telemedicine platform works in all its aspects, from data collection and elaboration to devices integration. Moreover, I experienced a new working approach. Engineers sometimes are too focused on finding only the best and most elegant technical solution. This can be good, but it is not the best practice in all the contexts, especially in e-health paradigm. In this field, you can come up the smartest and coolest system ever, but if your technology is not simple enough to be used by the final user, it can be completely useless. That is why Healthy Reply has always put a great effort on selecting only those technologies which respect this criterion.
What is the next step after graduation?
This is a good question. 🤔 Of course, I would like keep working in this branch and progress in a similar direction. In any case, telemedicine can be considered a field of application rather than a single discipline. For this reason, I would like to examine more in detail other frameworks exploited in this domain as, for example, Computer Vision or Biomedical Signal Processing.
Why a student should join Reply?
Reply is one of the few Italian companies which has never stop growing, giving you the opportunity to grow with it too.
Moreover, it is a very friendly environment where you can get to know a lot of people at, for example, one of the many internal activities they organise such as Labcamps, the Xchange, the LifeAtReply Day, Hackathons, etc,… You cannot get bored! 😉
Anything else you would like to share with us?
Sure, it’s time to thank some important people who made this experience possible. First of all, Healthy Reply that gave me the opportunity of doing my internship with them and my manager Nicola Bottone, Product Innovation expert in the Telemedicine field. Moreover, I would like to thank my professor and supervisor Michele Rossi, Data Science applied in Biometric Data expert. I am currently applying what I have learnt during his course, a sign that what is taught at university is not simply abstract speculation, but can be used also in real life.
