Objectives

Prisoners are members of the general population: they come from and usually return to the community (Health Prison Project - World Health Organisation, WHO).

The development of new information and communication technologies is meaning a real cultural and technological revolution of the modern society. In this context several telemedicine projects have been born, which allow distant health organisations to link up and communicate with each other. Lately, different reports and media-events in many EU Countries have drawn the attention of citizens, politicians and decision makers to the difficulty of dealing with the delivery of health care to inmates.

HUMAN addresses the needs of caring of EU inmates by applying new technologies to the area of delivery of health care in the prison environment, in order to increase the heath care quality and efficiency, and improve the working conditions of the medical and paramedical staff.

The HUMAN Project aims at enhancing the quality and continuity of care of patient-inmates by designing, developing and validating in two different European sites an umbrella of telemedicine and domotic services tailored on the inmates needs, as well as on the requirements of clinicians operating in detention centres. A preliminary study have been carried out by Project partners since December 1999, in order to elicit the following set of services of interest for the HUMAN project:

1. A (Web-enabled) decision support system to be used by clinicians in order to snapshot the "Current case history" of the inmates.

2. A core set of configured and customised set-ups for smart environments (prison cells), tailored on the health requirements of inmates with special needs (including disabled and elderly persons).

3. A Web based platform for supporting the provision of remote consulting from specialists, as well as second opinions from clinicians operating outside the prison environment, thus allowing all of the domain actors to exchange information (including complex medical images) in a safe and secure environment.

4. A Web based platform for supporting distance learning (eLearning) of in-house clinicians, throughout the fruition of e-learning sessions with specialists and general practitioners.