SENSATION remote monitoring system for enabling the "anytime, anywhere" monitoring of patients with selected sleep disorders.

The SENSATION Integrated Project aims at promoting the health, safety and quality of life of people and protect the environment by reducing relevant accidents and thus the impact on environment through the application of novel micro and nano sensors and related technologies, of low-cost and high-efficiency, for physiological state monitoring. The focus of the work will be the brain activity, including the sleep and wakefulness states and their boundaries, stress, inattention and hypovigilance states, for hypovigilance detection, prediction and management as well as diagnosis, treatment and remote monitoring of sleep disorders. In this paper, a presentation of the application scenarios of the integrated medical system will be made.

Delivery of healthcare services over mobile phones: e-Vital and CHS paradigms.

Health delivery practices are shifting towards home care, since there are better possibilities for managing chronic care, controlling health delivery costs, increasing quality of life and quality of health services and the distinct possibility of predicting and thus avoiding serious complications. Mobility brings a totally new dimension to the healthcare domain and to the whole interdisciplinary provision of regional healthcare. Healthcare services can be provided in virtually any location, where access to a mobile communications system is available. Mobile tele-health systems apply mobility as a potential means in order to bring significant improvements to emergency, treatment, routine check-ups and medical consultation, e-Vital project (eTen) and CHS project (IST) worked towards m-health applications.

Continuous home care monitoring services through INTERLIFE.

INTERLIFE is a revolutionary product that can radically change the way healthcare services are offered by introducing new means for quality health care management by the healthcare providers, and by improving the patients', health providers' and citizens' quality of life. INTERLIFE is a technological and medical knowledge management and processing infrastructure able to support an early discharge and a continuous home monitoring service thus leading to reduction hospitalisation rates and to the increased efficacy of healthcare service delivery of patients suffering from chronic diseases such as CHF, COPD and Diabetes as well as a special category of acute health care related patients. Six test sites are participating in the validation trials, more specifically EAP Sardenya and MUTUAM in Spain, Hippokrateion Hospital and AHEPA Hospital in Greece, RAMIT in Belgium and University of Regensburg Medical Centre in Germany.

Integration of monitoring devices in the e-Vital service.

The continuous treatment of chronic diseases such as heart diseases, pulmonary disease and diabetes, relies on the patient's self-monitoring. The rapid advance in the development of telemedicine systems and monitoring devices during last years gave several solutions in continuous patient telemonitoring. However, in most of the cases, these systems work with only one or a few types of medical devices and, thus, the variety of diseases they can monitor is rather limited. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that medical device manufacturers usually develop their own proprietary communication protocols and data format for each device. Most of the existing telemonitoring systems support communication with limited medical device types and depend on the manufacturer of them. We describe a modular and ambulatory telemedicine platform, the e-Vital platform, where different monitoring devices are being integrated in homecare and telemonitoring service chain, in order to increase patients' quality of life and their feeling of safety concerning their health.

Citizen centered health and lifestyle management via interactive TV: The PANACEIA-ITV health system.

In the context of an IST European project with acronym PANACEIA-ITV, a home care service provisioning system is described, based on interactive TV technology. The purpose of PANACEIA-ITV is to facilitate essential lifestyle changes and to promote compliance with scientifically sound self-care recommendations, through the application of interactive digital television for family health maintenance. The means to achieve these goals are based on technological, health services and business models. PANACEIA-ITV is looking for communication of monitoring micro-devices with I-TV set-top-boxes using infrared technology, and embodiment of analogous H/W and S/W in the I-TV set-top-boxes. Intelligent agents are used to regulate data flow, user queries as well as service provisions from and to the household through the satellite digital platform, the portal and the back-end decision support mechanisms, using predominantly the Active Service Provision (ASP) model. Moreover, interactive digital TV services are developed for the delivery of health care in the home care environment.

Modulation of human natural killer cell cytotoxic activity, lymphokine production, and interleukin 2 receptor expression by thymic hormones.

Thymic hormone preparations have been shown to modulate natural killer (NK) activity in vivo in mice. We have investigated the effects of thymosin fraction 5 (TF5) on the in vitro NK cell activity of highly purified human large granular lymphocytes (LGL). The results indicate that TF5 but not kidney fraction 5 (a preparation used as control) is able to enhance the spontaneous NK activity of normal LGL. In addition, TF5 exhibited additive effects with recombinant interferon-alpha in enhancing NK activity in vitro. TF5 also enhanced interleukin 2 production and interleukin 2 receptor expression as well as interferon-gamma production in mitogen-stimulated LGL. Thymosin-alpha 1, a synthetic polypeptide originally isolated in its native form from TF5, also exhibited enhancing effects on LGL activities, suggesting that it is the active species in TF5. These results indicate that thymic hormones might regulate NK activity through the induction of lymphokine production and receptor expression by LGL.

pH dependence of mitomycin C-induced cross-linking activity in EMT6 tumor cells.

Mitomycin C (MC), a quinone-containing bioreductive alkylating agent, is cytotoxic to aerobic EMT6 tumor cells despite the fact that little bioactivation of MC occurs in EMT6 cell homogenates in the presence of O2. Because spontaneous activation of MC at acidic pH has been reported in chemical systems, aerobic EMT6 tumor cells were incubated in serum-free 2-(N-morpholino)ethanesulfonic acid or N-2-hydroxyethylpiperazine-N'-2-ethanesulfonic acid buffer at pH 5.7, 6.4, and 7.5 and exposed to MC for 2 h. As the extracellular pH was lowered, MC-induced DNA-DNA cross-linking, as measured by alkaline elution techniques, was enhanced. This effect was dose dependent at the three pH values tested. Measurement of intracellular pH by flow cytometric analysis indicated that the decrease in extracellular pH was paralleled by a fall in intracellular pH. The alteration of the extracellular pH had no effect on the colony-forming ability of control cells. The survival of cells treated with MC, however, was decreased as the pH was lowered. These data suggest that the intracellular and/or the extracellular pH is an important determinant of MC activity in aerobic EMT6 tumor cells.