Assets

TreC Research Platform

TreC Research is a microservices-based platform initially designed as a Personal Health Record (PHR) according to the definition of Project Health Design: "A Personal Health Record (PHR) is a digital or physical record of an individual’s medical information, maintained by the individual or a caregiver in cases where the patient is unable to do so themselves. This record includes details such as:

• Allergies and other relevant medical conditions that can impact emergency care.

• Any other information the patient feels is pertinent.

• Self-reported and self-recorded health data, including health issues and treatments, records of vital signs and activity recorded with personal devices, nutritional data, etc.

The goal of a PHR is to allow the patient to keep their health data on hand for ready access for both themselves and anyone involved in their care, while maintaining the privacy and security of this data."

In the course of its development, TreC has evolved into a platform that not only provides support and monitoring services for chronic diseases and special health/wellness conditions to healthcare professionals but also facilitates research on the effectiveness of motivational interventions and digital therapies (DTx).

To this end, the platform integrates a series of core microservices, particularly:

• Authentication and authorization services.

• Clinical and personal data management services.

• Services that establish dedicated and secure communication channels between healthcare professionals or researchers and end-users (chat and video conferencing).

• Research study management and questionnaire delivery services.

Additionally, the platform is equipped with a web dashboard through which healthcare professionals and researchers can manage patient telemonitoring and intervention delivery pathways: enrolling patients in specific contexts, managing personal data, managing clinical and lifestyle data, prescribing actions and parameters to monitor, and assigning interventions delivered by the ViCo platform. The platform is complemented by a series of apps, specific to each context, that serve as the patient's/citizen's interaction interface with the platform.

A version of the platform was transferred to an external company in 2019, which implemented TreC+, through which the Provincial Health Services Agency launched the first version of the Electronic Health Record offering horizontal services (report distribution, prescriptions, appointment booking, etc.) to all citizens in the province. The next recent step was the integration of a telemonitoring service for patients with cardiac problems, developed and tested on the TreC Research platform.

Currently, TreC Research is the cornerstone platform for the technological realization of the center's Flagship projects: TreC Mamma and TreC Arianna, as well as the PAT Salute+ project, and the conceptual architecture of the emergency medical record to be developed in the e-Cream project.

ViCo Platform

ViCo is a microservices-based platform designed for delivering motivational interventions and digital therapies. It can integrate various modules, including those based on advanced AI techniques, for reasoning and generating inferences based on the state of the world, managing dialogues and user interactions, generating motivational and persuasive messages, etc.

ViCo has a dual objective:

1. Evaluation of Interventions and Digital Therapies: This is achieved through clinical trials. A digital therapy delivered by the system results from the coordinated intervention of various modules to a small group of patients/citizens enrolled by the researcher in a clinical study.

2. Validated Digital Therapy Delivery: Once a digital therapy is validated, it is delivered as per the prescribed timelines and methods through the user interface and devices used by the user to interact with the platform (typically smartphones and apps).

In its current version, the ViCo platform integrates:

• A SPARQL-based reasoner to perform inferences that trigger dialogue-based interventions. The reasoner aims to detect if user behavior aligns with the desired intervention goals as modeled in the intervention monitoring rules.

• A component for coordinating a set of bots for generating graph-based dialogues.

• Bots for various interventions, based on Drools, that execute graph dialogue models, asking the user questions and recording predefined responses in the dialogue, and can deliver videos and images.

The platform will integrate AI components produced by research and engineered by the DHILab team, such as a natural language generator for dynamically producing messages, a bot interacting with users in natural language based on large language models (LLMs), etc.