Personal health systems for diagnostics of sleep disorders using new sensors and grid technology

Personal Health Systems are developed for individualized diagnosis, prevention and treatment depending on the actual health-state of the regarding person with a minimum of interference of his or her daily life. They imply the continuous or at least frequent monitoring of the person´s health status, subsequent evaluation and possible action initialization, may it be feedback to the patient, a message to the attending physician or the readjustment of a therapeutical device. In this paper, we propose personal health systems that combine new sensor and information technologies. They allow for extensive undisturbing biosignal acquisition at the person´s home and comprehensive data processing and analysis using a grid infrastructure. The grid can be considered as a virtual space where people can share their personal health data with attending medical professionals and where an individual and adaptive set of processing and analysis tools is available in a uniform, easy-to-access and cost-efficient way. The current state of public IT networks and grid infrastructures may not allow real-time applications, while complex near-term postprocessing and decision support can be accomplished. The presented systems are dedicated to sleep related breathing disorders, but the underlying concept may also be suitable for other use-cases.