E-Health, News, Studie, 2020
istock/ janiecbros

Approaching the automation of digital therapy

News from Oct. 14, 2020

The digitization of the health care system forms the basis for initial approaches to the automation of standard procedures and care processes. However, the efficiency promises of automation are diverse and have so far been based on individual examinations. Fraunhofer FOKUS has just published a study on the state of the art of automation approaches for digital therapy applications.

The study “Automation Approaches for Digital Therapies - State of the Art” provides information on where automatisms support medical or therapeutic actions to improve the quality of medical treatment or to relieve medical staff.

The results indicate that the automation of therapy and treatment processes has already found its way into all indications and application areas. This applies, for example, to cardiology as well as to psychotherapy, diabetology, or even geriatric applications in nursing. In all digital therapy applications, automatisms can be identified, ranging from the automatic acquisition of vital data to complex analyses of care processes. From the prediction of stroke risk in cardiology, via therapy recommendations in oncology, to the mobilization of the musculoskeletal system in neurology - automatisms can be found frequently in the therapy process.

In the field of digital therapies, it became clear that the majority of the automated processes are less complicated and easy to understand functionalities that include, for example, clearly defined rules, threshold values, or scoring mechanisms. From a technological point of view, the foundations for more complex automatisms nevertheless seem to have been laid. They also suggest that functionalities from the field of Artificial Intelligence, which are currently used almost exclusively in applications for doctors and therapists, could be used increasingly in patient-centered applications for the automation of treatment and therapy processes.

The complete study is available for download on the website of the “Innovationszentrum Telehealth Technologies”.