WP 4 - University: WUR-1
Faculty: Agrotechnology and Food Sciences
Measuring the unmeasurable: identifying how disease status impacts health of multiple organ systems over the life course.
To develop tailored risk-based recommendations for high-risk populations it is essential to collect data on physiological and behaviour outcomes through monitoring. However, if monitoring becomes too burdensome and interferes with the daily life activities of a patient this can negatively impact a patient's quality of life. Furthermore, this can reduce adherence to the monitoring activities. For effective monitoring it is, thus, important to find a balance between amount of data that needs to be collected and the burden of monitoring for the patient.
Wearable sensors and home-based monitoring provide opportunities to reduce the burden of monitoring for the patient while increasing or maintaining the amount of data collected. Within our workpackage, we aim to investigate the potential of wearable devices and home-based monitoring for monitoring the health of a particular target group: women who have received surgical or pharmacological treatment for obesity. Though there is ample evidence that obesity treatments are effective in reduce long-term bodyweight and obesity-related comorbidities. This patient group is at risk of late negative effects of treatment due to the impaired nutritional status. The extend to which this impaired nutritional status impacts health on the longer term, however, is largely unknown. Contributing to this current focus of monitoring on body weight and comorbidities, but also the high rate of loss to follow-up. Within two years 30 to 60% of the patients stop attending follow-up visits. In this patient group there is thus a need to increase monitoring of long-term outcomes without increasing the burden for the patients.
Over the last two years, our research team, in collaboration with the Vitalys, has established a prospective observation cohort study for which recruitment started in January 2025. The aim of this study, called the MONUCO study, is to monitor the health of 1150 women for up to 10 years after obesity treatment. The results of this study will be used to investigate association between lifestyle behaviours, nutritional status and health outcomes. Additionally, the validity and feasibility of a selection of wearable sensors and other home-based monitoring methods will be assessed in this study populations. The research team has started an investigation into the feasibility and validity of using commercially available wearables sensors for monitoring patients after obesity treatment. This investigation was kicked off with a scoping review on the influence of user characteristics, such as sex, age and BMI, on wearable validity in collaboration with other members of the RECENTRE program. Furthermore, together with the RECENTRE members from Eindhoven and other collaborators for the University of Utrecht and University Medical Center Utrecht, the research team has started exploring opportunities for improving the feasibility and accuracy of body composition measurement in patients with obesity.