Care4MyHeart-PSG: A Personalized Serious Game Platform to Empower Phase III Cardiac Rehabilitation of Cardiovascular Disease Patients in UAE

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the major cause of death in the UAE, causing one in every five deaths. Effective Cardiac Rehabilitation (CR) can significantly improve mortality and morbidity rates, leading to longer independent living and a reduced use of healthcare resources. The proposed project, namely Care4MyHeart, sets as an overall goal to introduce a personalized home-based CR program, enabling lifestyle behavioral change towards increased quality of life, surpassing the currently unsustainable provision of healthcare for CVD. In particular, the Care4MyHeart-Pesronalized Serious Game (C4MH-PSG) platform targets CVD patients entering Phase III, as this is where large numbers of patients, who would benefit significantly from exercise and CR, drop out. C4MH-PSG supports the key predictors for attendance to CR Phase III programs, including high program availability, ease of access to program location, high social connectivity, peer support (when peers share similar problems or/and can become peer mentors), and high self-efficacy. Within C4MH-PSG, advanced machine learning and modelling techniques are employed to propose gender- and age-specific CVD exercise programs and an autonomous helper-agent, providing informed feedback to the patient and the related physician/carer, establishing a collaborative patient-professional partnership. C4MH-PSG is realized via motion capture, exercise evaluation, physiological and lifestyle monitoring, exercise gaming, home-based human-computer interfacing, multi-parametric data modelling and advanced decision support systems. Finally, the overall concept and system are easily transferable to address other diseases/conditions (e.g., diabetes, osteoporosis, obesity), providing market opportunities for the commercialization of C4MH-PSG beyond CVD.