eHealth: Survey on research projects, comparative study of telemonitoring architectures and main issues

Today, the number of elderly people and patients with reduced autonomy or with chronic diseases are steadily increasing. In addition, a stay in hospital or nursing home is very expensive. Thus, in recent years we have witnessed the development of projects to keep these people at home while providing them the needed care and assistance. The number of research projects that have emerged around the world during these last years is very important. Thus we are interested in studying a number of these projects. In this study, we focus on European projects because there is a great similarity with other projects (American, Asian and African projects). After a detailed study of various European research projects conducted in the telemonitoring of patients field, we identify the main requirements of a telemonitoring system. Then, we introduce the common components of these systems. After that, we provide a comparative study in terms of offered services, technical issues, supported functionalities and tools involved in the implementation of the proposed systems. Finally, we introduce some interesting perspectives for the patient telemonitoring research field.