SEMEiotic Oriented Technology for Individual’s CardiOmetabolic risk self-assessmeNt and Self-monitoring (SEMEOTICONS)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: ICT for Health, Ageing Well, Inclusion and Governance
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Italy,Greece,Sweden,United Kingdom,Norway,France,Spain
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2013-10, 2013)
Start date: 2013-11-01
End date: 2016-10-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 5383126.0
EU funding (EUR): 3870000.0
Participants: 10
Project status: CLOSED

According to medical semeiotics, human face is a precious revealer of key information about the healthy or unhealthy status of individuals, as a combination of physical signs and expressive features. The central idea in SEMEOTICONS is to exploit the face as a major indicator of individual’s well-being for the prevention of cardio-metabolic risk and cardiovascular diseases (CVD), for which healthcare systems are registering an exponential growth of social costs. In accordance to a semeiotics viewpoint, face signs will be mapped to measures and computational descriptors, automatically assessed. To this end, SEMEOTICONS will design and construct an innovative multisensory system integrated into a hardware platform having the exterior aspect of a mirror: the so-called “Wize Mirror”. This will easily fit into users’ home or other sites of their daily life (e.g. fitness and nutritional centres, pharmacies, schools and so on). The Wize Mirror will collect data mainly in the form of videos, images and gas concentration signals. These will be processed by advanced dedicated methods to extract biometric, morphometric, colorimetric, and compositional descriptors measuring individual’s facial signs. The integration of such descriptors will provide a Virtual Individual’s Model, which will be used to compute and trace the daily evolution of an individual’s “wellness index”. A well-being diary based on this index will enable users to evaluate and personally correlate the lifestyle to their wellness and health status. Suggestions and coaching messages will be also provided to foster the maintenance of a correct lifestyle or reduce noxious habits. Moreover, users will be enabled to share data in their diary with health professionals so as to receive, when needed, direct expert guidance and support. In this frame, SEMEOTICONS will carefully focus on the development of user-friendly human-computer interactions so as to foster the perception of the system usefulness and reliability. Medical experts will validate the system with respect to the reproducibility of measurements, the efficacy in detecting changes in well-being and cardio-metabolic status and the acceptability by the end-users. The exploitation of the Wize Mirror will promote new aggregations between health and well-being actors including industry, fitness, and schools. Furthermore, significant effects towards the development of new CVD prevention strategies are expected, with positive impacts on the reduction of avoidable disease burden and health expenditures.

Keywords: wellness self-monitoring,personalized guidance systems,multisensory systems,biometrics,morphometrics,facial signs,wellness index,digital semeiotics,virtual individual model