OSA patient empowerment for effective and resilient home caretreatment

Linde Home Care France has been supporting patients at home with personalized interventions for over 5 years, through projects involving a number of scientific and technical contributions. For the specific treatment of obstructive sleep apnea, the concepts developed cover prediction of patient adherence, patient care pathways, patient profile identification, therapy monitoring, intervention planning, patient feedback, multi-stakeholder verification and validation, etc. These concepts have been implemented in two mobile applications and tested on 6 patients.
The new research work targeted by this CIFRE thesis aims to strengthen the consideration of patient perception of their treatment via several survey models recognized in the medical sector. This patient-centered approach aims to progressively accompany patients in their treatment from the earliest phases of the care protocol (defined by a doctor), in order to detect any feelings of anxiety or risk that might limit their adherence to treatment. The proposed approach is based on three scientific axes: The first line of research involves extending the selection of surveys suitable for sleep apnea therapy, so that they can be coded in the existing patient application (LISA). Based on Linde's experience in supporting patients at home, a set of events will be analyzed to identify causal links, risk levels and triggering factors. The scientific challenge lies in exploiting unstructured textual data (collected by Linde technicians) to make the link between the events listed and the investigations to be targeted.
The second line of research concerns the exploitation of data to be collected from implemented surveys in order to improve patient classification algorithms, the choice of interventions to propose to patients, and the orchestration model for these interventions to ensure better adherence to treatment. The targeted approach must be agile in order to progressively measure the effectiveness of the integration of this feedback.
The third line of research concerns the updating of a test protocol, its validation, and its implementation for a test campaign with a large number of patients. All the players involved (Linde managers and technicians, doctors, etc.) will be mobilized to ensure the success of this test campaign. This test campaign will measure the efficacy and resilience (indicators to be defined) of the treatment in relation to current trends at Linde.