Research regarding stroke indicates that ensuring a short elapsed time between accident and treatment can be fundamental to allow saving patient's life and avoid future sequels. This paper describes a model for monitoring and rescuing victims in situations of possible stroke occurrence. It uses stroke symptoms that can be monitored by mobile equipment, ambient intelligence, and artificial neural networks. The model is independent of human operation and applications or third party devices, therefore adding facilities to increase the quality of life for people with stroke sequel, due to constant monitoring and follow-up provided, allowing the stroke patient to consider a recovery period with greater autonomy. A prototype based on free software platforms was developed, to assess the accuracy and the time elapsed between the prototype to detect and to send an alert. The results indicate a positive outcome for the work continuity.
Top1. Introduction
The health is one of the areas that can benefit using information for decision making. The growth of health informatics is associated in part due to advances in computing and communication technologies. Also is related to the belief that medical knowledge and patient information are not manageable by traditional methods based on paper and also because of the certainty that access to knowledge processes and decision making play a central role in modern medicine (SBIS, 2014)
Health informatics area is growing on many fronts, and one of the motivations to this advances is the information need for decision making, that is also motivation to an increase in the number of health informatics research projects. Nevertheless, only 27% of research in health informatics area is aimed at the patient monitoring for disease prevention. When the subject of monitoring is Stroke, this number is even lower (IWAYA et al., 2013).
The distribution of deaths caused by cardiovascular diseases in Brazil has shown increasing importance among people over 20 years old, also reaching the level of the first cause of mortality in the range of 40 years old and predominantly in the following age groups. Among these, is situated the cerebrovascular diseases and especially the stroke (FALCÃO et al., 2004). According to Almeida (2012), worldwide Stroke is the second leading cause of death. Also, it represents the third cause of death in industrialized countries and the major cause of disability among adults. Besides that, in the group of cerebrovascular diseases, considering this age group, acute stroke corresponds to over 80% of admissions by the Brazilian Unified Health System (FALCÃO et al., 2004).
Over the last decades, Brazil has been changing his morbidity and mortality profile, with chronic diseases the leading causes of death. Among the most significant chronic illnesses is the stroke, which is one of the main causes of hospitalization and mortality. The stroke causes, in most patients, some form of disability, either partial or complete (ALMEIDA, 2012). Regardless of type, the stroke is the cause of dissatisfaction with life and various functional limitations because of loss of autonomy resulted from disabilities resulting from the incident (FALCÃO et al., 2004).
Information maintained by the World Health Federation indicates that every year, near 15 million people worldwide suffer a stroke. From this context, approximately six million dies and five million are left permanently disabled. According to (Rosamond et al., 2008) and (Thrift et al., 2014), stroke is the second leading cause of disability, after dementia. Regarding global health, the stroke is indicated as the second most frequent cause of death for elder people, above the age of 60 years.
According to Donnan et al. (2008), stroke is the cerebrovascular disease with the highest incidence and is more morbidity, with mortality rates around 25% within one month, 33% at six months and reaching 50% within one year. In cases diagnosed with intracerebral hemorrhage, the prognosis is even worse, because only 50% of patients survive after the first month. The authors Almeida (2012), Chaves (2000), Falcon et al. (2004), Cumbler et al. (2010) claim that stroke is a medical emergency. Perlini and Mancussi and Faro (2005) point out that the doctor should work quickly in these cases because it has a limited time window to perform the necessary interventions.