MediNet: Personalizing the self-care process for patients with diabetes and cardiovascular disease using mobile telephony

This paper describes MediNet, a mobile healthcare system that is being developed to personalize the self-care process for patients with both diabetes and cardiovascular disease. These two diseases were chosen based on their interrelationship. Patients with diabetes are at least twice as likely to have heart disease or a stroke as compared to persons without diabetes. Furthermore, persons with diabetes also tend to develop heart disease or have strokes at an earlier age than other people. MediNet uses a reasoning engine to make recommendations to a patient based on current and previous readings from monitoring devices connected to the patient and on information that is known about the patient. It caters for the uniqueness of each patient by personalizing its recommendations based on individual level characteristics of the patient, as well as on characteristics that groups of patients tend to share.