MENSSANA

Mobile Expert and Networking System for Systematical Analysis of Nutrition-based Allergies

The management of food allergies consists in educating the patient to avoid ingesting the responsible allergen. Patients are required to identify individual allergens in the daily food. Unfortunately, while purchasing their food, people are left alone with ingredient descriptions that are difficult to read and understand. Ingredient lists are printed on the food packages but food producers are not forced by European legislation to provide this information to any governmental institution for consumer protection. Patients food diaries are important to identify individual food related allergens. However, several studies have shown that significant amounts of the data in patients diaries is fudged or fabricated. The project will analyse, how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can support patients and health professionals in daily life settings.

The MENSSANA project has several main objectives:

1. Develop a barcode reading Personal Allergy Assistant (PAA), which helps to distinguish permitted and prohibited food.
2. Definition of a standardised Electronic Patient Record for Allergies (EPRA) with coherent patient diaries, acquisition of patient anamnesis, representation of allergy tests.
3. Provide food based allergy specific information via Internet.
4. Conducting a controlled clinical study to evaluate health economic effects and quality of life.

(read more)

14 points concerning what to do and what not to do when setting up a web 2.0 platform

These general guidelines are intended to highlight some of the potential risks that an Internet content or service provider might face. They are the result of a comparative research study conducted at the University of Luxembourg (www.uni.lu) in partnership with the Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor (www.tudor.lu). and funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg (www.fnr.lu). The legal part of the project focused on issues associated with the hosting of Internet content, thereby examining the liability regimes of several EU Member States.

WikiFood (www.wikifood.eu) builds up a volunteer network of food product users that fill up the database by typing in the ingredients lists of products that may be interesting for the community of allergy patients and consumers. Digital photos of EAN codes, packages, and ingredient lists help to validate the data entries. WikiFood offers the possibility to get information about interesting food products and to prepare the purchase and thus preventing threats. (read more)

• Develop and validate a patient’s allergen profile by automatically analyzing ingested ingredients, allergens and symptoms. Profile then downloaded to a smart phone application and used to diagnose the patient.
• Diagnosis accuracy improved via a novel natural language processing algorithm that identifies allergens in ingredient data that may be written in a complex, non-standard way (or in a foreign language).
• Software includes functionality that calculates the relative risk for food items based on the patient’s profile.
• Database of manufacturer products with ingredient/allergen data dynamically linked for use by both the physician and patient.
• Designed to work with ICD10 and pharmacological (CEFIP) databases for standardization in patient profiles.
• Java® based technology. Available for Mac OS, Windows and Linux operating systems.

• Electronic Patient Diary – easily record consumed food products, medications, symptoms, and physical activities. Data uploaded/downloaded to the physician’s desktop via secure, normal cell phone connection.
• Bar code reading functionality alerts patient when possible allergen has been identified based on established profile. Links food products, ingredient and allergen data to provide reliable data for purchase decisions
• Time stamped entries increase the accuracy of the data collected from the patient. Physician’s software can then correlate symptoms to food/medicine ingestion times in order to accurately identify allergens.

Dr. rer. medic. Dipl.- Ing. Norbert Rösch, (MPH) Project manager biomedical engineering and Public Health

Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor, SANTEC

phone: +352 42 59 91 - 1

fax : +352 42 59 91 - 333

(alphabetical order)

and more…

(alphabetical order)

• Dr. Jorde (Mönchengladbach)
• Prof. Dr. Schlöndorff (Aachen)
• Prof. Dr. Schneider (Trier)
• Dr. Shannoun (Luxembourg)
• Prof. Dr. Zuberbier (Berlin)
• Prof. Dr. van Cauwenberge (Ghent)

This project is funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche - FNR

Project Publications