There is currently limited evidence for the development of integrated solutions that support appropriate healthcare system management, long-term health policy making, and platforms that increase the provision of actionable insights at the point of care. The EVOTION project generates evidence to support integrated decision support in a platform for the creation of holistic hearing loss management policies. The EVOTION platform includes big data analytics and enable the collection and analysis of heterogeneous data related to hearing loss.
According to the World Health Organization, hearing loss is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases and the 5th cause of disability. Hearing loss increases the risk of cognitive decline, mental illness, and depression, and leads to social isolation, unemployment/early retirement, loss of income and work discrimination. The main intervention for hearing loss is the provision of Hearing Aids, although their use is costly and their benefits not sufficient in all situations.
Holistic management of hearing loss calls for appropriate public health policies which target hearing loss prevention, protection from noise, early diagnosis, long-term treatment and rehabilitation, detection and prevention of cognitive decline, and socioeconomic inclusion of patients with hearing loss.
The evidential basis is generated by accessing existing big datasets from five of its partner organisations and continuous collection of real time data produced by sensors and Hearing Aids used by patients with hearing loss. The collected data consists of hearing aid usage, noise episodes (temporary threshold shifts), audiological, physiological, cognitive, clinical and medication, personal, occupational, behavioural, life style, environmental, and open web data.
The EVOTION platform will help health care professionals and health policy makers to identify, simulate, select and monitor the effectiveness of current and new hearing loss interventions.
The EVOTION platform, as a system prototype demonstration in operational environment, enables:
To achieve this, EVOTION brings together public health policy organisations, experts and authorities. Combining the holistic perspective to management of hearing loss with the social and occupational inclusion and well-being of patients with hearing loss, the project will effectively support and validate the formation of the targeted policies.
The EVOTION Consortium is composed of thirteen (13) partners representing universities, hospitals, research organizations and companies from seven (7) EU member countries (i.e., UK, Denmark, Poland, Hellas, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Italy) and one associate country (Switzerland). The consortium is carefully set up to combine multidisciplinary competencies from health policy making, clinical, academic, industry, and research community including partners willing to cooperate and sharing such diverse and complementary technical skills and clinical and scientific expertise required for the development of the EVOTION platform. The selection of partners was based on criteria of experience, expertise and most of all complementarity. All participants are highly committed to the development of the system, thus guaranteeing the realization of the project’s objectives.
More information about EVOTION project.
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