Personal Health Monitoring – motivation

Recently, the average costs for public health care are increasing dramatically. About 250 billion € were just spent for health care by the German citizens. Here, about the half was paid by the public insurance, whereas the other half is afforded by the private insurance and the patient itself. With an increase rate of around 4.6% per year, the rise of the expenses is obtrusively higher than the increase of the gross domestic product. Just since 1985, the costs have more than doubled.

Demographic influences

In the health care sector the demand of services is pretty much depending on the public structure and size of a country. Understandable, the health care costs are in average increasing with the age of a patient. As an example, a 70 years old patient is producing about five times more costs than a 20 years old one. Taking the demographic change in the German population into account, the big challenge for the health care system can be seen clearly. It can be taken as a fact, that the relative amount of elderly people will increase in the next time. With a ratio of 14.6% of the people with an age of 60 years and older in the year 1950, this group of population will have increased to about 40% in 2040. At the same time, the amount of citizens younger than 20 years will decrease, as a result of the decreasing birth rates since 1970. [Source: Fed. Statistical Dep. of Germany]

When analyzing the correlation of higher health care costs and increasing age, it can be found the the increase in costs is most of the time due to the stationary stays in hospitals (compare figure). In fact, more than 40% of all hospitality days are used of over 64 years old patients. In most cases as a reason of an illness of the circulation system. However, many stays are just necessary for surveillance purposes, e.g., after an critical operation. They could be reduced, if home monitoring would be feasible. Besides drastic cost reductions also an increase of the patients live quality would be given, as it could recover of its operation in its known environment. Such a personal health monitoring system is the goal of the PHMon project. With the means of modern information technology, a system for the surveillance of the vital parameters of the patient is going to be developed.