Lifestyle Diseases: Early Detection and Management

  • Dr Manju Jain

Abstract

Lifestyle diseases are caused due to health damaging choices that one makes in their day-to-day life.
The onset of these diseases is insidious, they take years to develop, and once encountered do not lend
themselves easily to cure.
Lifestyle diseases are non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Four major types of NCDs are
cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer and chronic respiratory diseases. Risk factors such as a
person's background, lifestyle and environment are known to increase the likelihood of certain
noncommunicable diseases. They include age, gender, genetics, exposure to air pollution, and
behaviors such as smoking, unhealthy diet, and physical inactivity which can lead to hypertension and
obesity, in turn leading to increased risk of many NCDs. Most NCDs are considered preventable
because they are caused by modifiable risk factors. An early detection means offering treatment at a
more favorable stage or taking action to prevent the disease. It is essential to have a coordinated,
strategic prevention approach that promotes healthy behavior, helps early detection and diagnosis of
disease, supports people of every age and eliminates health disparities. A Preventive Health Checkup
aims to identify and minimize risk factors in addition to detecting illness at an early stage. Ongoing
cuttingedge multidisciplinary research in textile fibers, biomedical sensors, and wireless and mobile
telecommunications integrated with telemedicine, aims at developing intelligent biomedical clothing
(IBC) that could pave the way to support personalized management of health and diseases at the point
of need and at any time. Activity monitoring of a person for a long-term would be helpful for controlling
lifestyle associated diseases. Home Healthcare Monitoring Framework manages lifestyle diseases
using long-term activity monitoring. The framework recognizes the user's activities with the help of
the sensed data in runtime and reports the irregular and unhealthy activity patterns to a doctor and a
caregiver. The framework has a hierarchical structure that consists of four layers: activity classification
layer, activity pattern generation layer, disease inferring layer and application layer.

Published
2020-10-03
Section
Articles