Managing COPD Exacerbations with Telemedicine

Managing chronic disease through automated systems has the potential to both benefit the patient and reduce health-care costs. We are developing and evaluating a monitoring system for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease which aims to detect exacerbations and thus help patients manage their disease and prevent hospitalisation. We have carefully drafted a system design consisting of an intelligent device that is able to alert the patient, collect casespecific, subjective and objective, physiological data, offer a patient-specific interpretation of the collected data by means of probabilistic reasoning, and send data to a central server for inspection by health-care professionals. A first pilot with actual COPD patients suggests that an intervention based on this system could be successful.