Peter Leijdekkers received his Master’s degree and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
Peter Leijdekkers has been a researcher for more than 20 years in both industry and academia, with interests in Telecommunications, IT and Mobile applications. His current research is in the e-health domain. It focuses on the use of mobile technology and data analysis to offer better and more personalised advice and care. His current work harnesses data from mobile devices, wearable technology and electronic health records to offer a better and more holistic view on someone’s wellness.
He founded the company myFitnessCompanion.com that focuses on health and fitness apps.
Prior to his appointment at UTS in 2004, Peter Leijdekkers worked as R&D Team leader at Lucent Bell Labs. He participated in several European funded projects working with many research institutes, universities and companies. In these European funded projects his role was that of Technical Manager responsible for the technical coherence and direction of the project as well as contributing to technical aspects.
Before joining Lucent Technology in 2000, Peter Leijdekkers worked as a Senior Engineer and Team Leader in four ICT companies in Australia, and he was a Research Scientist at KPN Research in The Netherlands and USA.
Peter's research focuses on mobile applications in the e-Health domain and on the use of mobile technology and data analysis to offer better and more personalised advice and care. His current work harnesses data from mobile devices, wearable technology and electronic health records to offer a better and more holistic view on someone’s wellness. Peter is technical director of the mHealth lab.
myFitnessCompanion.com: Personalised, intelligent, innovative, non-intrusive, real time health and fitness monitoring using wireless sensors.
Emotion-aware Apps (CaptureMyEmotion): Use of sensor technologies and facial expression recognition to sense emotions and create emotion-aware apps. Design of a suite of Apps to provide a very personalised way to help autistic children and their carers understanding and managing their emotions.
Peter Leijdekkers has more than 10 years of teaching experience. His experience extends across Computer Science, Telecommunications and Software development with a particular focus on mobile app development.
Lecturer and coordinator of Mobile Networking (31275).
Lecturer and coordinator of Mobile Application Development (31285).
Supervising special projects in area of mobile app development (31091).
Background: A transformation is underway regarding how we deal with our health. Mobile devices make it possible to have continuous access to personal health information. Wearable devices, such as Fitbit and Apple's smartwatch, can collect data continuously and provide insights into our health and fitness. However, lack of interoperability and the presence of data silos prevent users and health professionals from getting an integrated view of health and fitness data. To provide better health outcomes, a complete picture is needed which combines informal health and fitness data collected by the user together with official health records collected by health professionals. Mobile apps are well positioned to play an important role in the aggregation since they can tap into these official and informal health and data silos.
Objective: The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that a mobile app can be used to aggregate health and fitness data and can enable interoperability. It discusses various technical interoperability challenges encountered while integrating data into one place.
Methods: For 8 years, we have worked with third-party partners, including wearable device manufacturers, electronic health record providers, and app developers, to connect an Android app to their (wearable) devices, back-end servers, and systems.
Results: The result of this research is a health and fitness app called myFitnessCompanion, which enables users to aggregate their data in one place. Over 6000 users use the app worldwide to aggregate their health and fitness data. It demonstrates that mobile apps can be used to enable interoperability. Challenges encountered in the research process included the different wireless protocols and standards used to communicate with wireless devices, the diversity of security and authorization protocols used to be able to exchange data with servers, and lack of standards usage, such as Health Level Seven, for medical information exchange.
Sensor technologies and facial expression recognition are now widely used by mobile devices to sense our environment and our own physical and mental state. With these technologies today, we have the ability to sense emotions and create emotion-aware apps. One target group that would benefit from emotion-aware Apps are autistic children as they have difficulty understanding and expressing emotions and they are keen mobile device users. However, current mobile apps aimed at autistic children are not emotion-aware. This led our team to design a suite of Apps, called CaptureMyEmotion, that uses wireless sensors to capture physiological data together with facial expression recognition to provide a very personalised way to help autistic children and their carers understanding and managing their emotions. This paper describes how we designed CaptureMyEmotion and it discusses our experience while using sensors and facial expression recognition to detect emotion. It presents in more details the first App we developed for Android phone and tablets, called MyMedia. MyMedia enables children to take photos, videos or sounds, and simultaneously attach emotion data to them. The photos can then be reviewed together with a carer providing them a new way to understand emotions and discussing their daily activities.
Multimedia conferencing services have specific performance requirements with respect to the exchange of continuous media. One of these requirements is the synchronization within and between related streams. This article identifies synchronization requirements and solutions relevant for conferencing services that operate in an open distributed environment as defined in TINA-C. Based on the TINA service lifecycle, synchronization requirements and policies are described from different stakeholder perspectives. Synchronization is then specified in detail using the TINA information, computational and engineering languages. Finally, a description of the implementation of synchronization for a multimedia conferencing service is provided using a DPE platform. The synchronization object is proposed as an additional component available for the DPE that needs to deal with real-time audio-visual streams.
Leijdekkers, P & Teunissen, B 1992, 'Synchronization Of Multimedia Data Streams In Open Distributed Environments', Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 614, pp. 94-104.
Teens and young adults are in one of the most challenging phases of their life in terms of discovering new and complex emotions and situations. This is particularly the case for a demographic diagnosed with conditions commonly referred to as Autistic Spectrum Disorders, which is inclusive of Asperger's Syndrome. Through a video game medium, it is possible to place the players in virtual situations that explore these the intricacies of social interaction and relationships. This could be powerful for communicating such concepts: players can be explained to, practice and given feedback in a comfortable, non-threatening, and perhaps even familiar environment.
Our objective is to build such a game by modifying an already popular video game. Through modification, a game's already existing mechanisms and resources may be repurposed for serious functions. In the case of our team, this is to allow the player to have conversations that dynamically change depending on their input. Characters in the game can be manipulated to communicate verbally and non-verbally, delivering emotive lines recorded by voice actors whilst projecting certain facial expressions and body language.
We created a tangible video game learning resource that can be trialed to investigate its value to build social awareness.
Background: The effective care and well-being of a community is a challenging task especially in an emergency situation. Traditional technology-based silos between health and emergency services are challenged by the changing needs of the community that could benefit from integrated health and safety services. Low-cost smart-home automation solutions, wearable devices and Cloud technology make it feasible for communities to interact with each other, and with health and emergency services in a timely manner.
Objectives: This paper proposes a new community-based care model, supported by technology, that aims at reducing healthcare and emergency services costs while allowing community to become resilient in response to health and emergency situations.
Methods: We looked at models of care in different industries and identified the type of technology that can support the suggested new model of care. Two prototypes were developed to validate the adequacy of the technology.
Results: The result is a new community-based model of care called 'Le Bon Samaritain'. It relies on a network of people called 'Bons Samaritains' willing to help and deal with the basic care and safety aspects of their community. Their role is to make sure that people in their community receive and understand the messages from emergency and health services. The new care model is integrated with existing emergency warning, community and health services.
Conclusion: Le Bon Samaritain model is scalable, community-based and can help people feel safer, less isolated and more integrated in their community. It could be the key to reduce healthcare cost, increase resilience and drive the change for a more integrated emergency and care system.
Nowadays, health, fitness and contextual data can be ubiquitously collected using wearable devices, sensors and smart phones and be stored in various servers and devices. However, to engage users in active monitoring of their health and fitness, it is essential to personalise the monitoring and have all the relevant data in one place. It is also important to give users control on how their data is collected, analysed, presented and stored.
This paper presents how those important features are integrated in myFitnessCompanion®, an Android Health and fitness app developed by our team. The app is able to aggregate data from multiple sources, keep it on the phone or export it to servers or Electronic Health Records (EHR). It can also present the aggregated data in a personalised manner. A mobile app such as myFitnessCompanion® is a solution to the personalisation, interoperability and control issues that are key to user engagement.
One of the main challenges for autistic children is to identify and express emotions. Many emotion-learning apps are available for smartphones and tablets to assist autistic children and their carers. However, they do not use the full potential offered by mobile technology, such as using facial expression recognition and wireless biosensors to recognise and sense emotions. To fill this gap we developed CaptureMyEmotion, an Android App that uses wireless sensors to capture physiological data together with facial expression recognition to provide a very personalised way to help autistic children learn about their emotions. The App enables children to capture photos, videos or sounds, and simultaneously attach emotion data and a self-portrait photo. The material can then be reviewed and discussed together with a carer at a later stage. CaptureMyEmotion has the potential to help autistic children integrate better in the society by providing a new way for them to understand their emotions.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is estimated to affect one in eighty-eight children and many mobile apps are available from Google Play or Apple store to help these children and their carer. Our research into apps for autistic children identified that none of the apps use the full potential offered by mobile technology and sensors to overcome one of autisticc children's main difficulty: the identification and expression of emotions. This paper describes a mobile apps called CaptureMyEmotion that enables autistic childrens to take photo, videos or sounds, and at the same time senses their arousal level using a wireless sensor. It also allows the child to comment on their emotion at the time of capture. The app has the potential to help autistic children improve their emotions lerating based on their own pictures, videos or sounds. It gives the carer a means to discuss the identification and expressionn of emotions.
This paper describes CaptureMyEmotion, an app for smartphones adn tablets which uses wireless sensors to capture physiological data together with facial expressions recognitition to provide a very personalized way to help autistic children and their career, but none of the existing apps users the full potential offered by mobile technology and sensors to overcome one of autistic children's main difficulty: the identificationand expressions of emotions. CaptureMyEmotion enable autistic children to capture photos, video or sounds, and identify the emotions they felt while taking the picture. Simultaneously, a self-portrait of the child is taken, and the app measures the arousal and stress levels using wireless sensors. The app uses the self portrait to provide a better estimate of the emotion felt byt the child. The app has the potential to help autistic children understand their emotions and it gives the career insight into the child;s emotions and offers a means to discuss the child's feelings.
Gay, VC & Leijdekkers, P 2012, 'Personalised Mobile Health and Fitness Apps: Lessons learned from myFitnessCompanion', 9th International Conference on Wearable Micro and Nano Technologies for Personalized Health, 9th International Conference on Wearable Micro and Nano Technologies for Personalized Health, IOS Press Inc, Porto, Portugal, pp. 248-253.
Smartphone and tablets are slowly but steadily changing the way we look after our health and fitness. Today, many high quality mobile apps are available for users and health professionals and cover the whole health care chain, i.e. information collection, prevention, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring. Our team has developed a mobile health and fitness app called myFitnessCompanion (R) which has been available via Android market since February 2011. The objective of this paper is to share our experience with rolling out a mobile health and fitness app. We discuss the acceptance of health apps by end-users and healthcare industry. We discuss the acceptance of health apps will be distributed in the near future, the use of Personal Health Record (PHR) systems such as Microsoft Health Vault and impact of regulations (FDA) on the future of mobile health apps. The paper is based on seven years of experience by the authors as mobile health and fitness application developers and we discuss the challenges and opportunities for app developers in the health industry.
Mobile devices are blending into our lives and change the way we manage our social life but also how we look after our health. Hundreds of health apps are available for mobile devices and many use social network functionalities that allow users to exchange personal experiences and discuss their health with others. This has many positive results but also negative side effects. This paper discusses the good, the bad and the ugly about social network integration with mobile health applications. It is based on a comprehensive review of literature, social networking health forums, surveys, and our own experience with health apps for mobile devices.
In this paper we describe our approach to improve medication adherence. The issue of medication adherence is widely been studied. The paper discusses the differences between existing technologies/devices used to improve medication adherence and proposes a novel solution that links between technologty and behavious change model to predict and assess people tendency to make a change models to predict and assess people tendency to make a change models to predict and assess people tendency to make a change in their health behaviour towards adhering to their medication regimens. The use of technology in this intervention is aiming at assessing the effectiveness of using technology to motivate subjects and improve their medication adherence ratings.
A trial with a cardiac rehabilitation centre is in progress where we test a novel cardiac rehab application using a standard mobile phone and wireless sensors. The goal is to obtain insight how remote monitoring compares to conventional rehabilitation methods in terms of adherence to cardiac rehabilitation programmes. In this trial we seek feedback from patients and health professionals regarding usability and practicability of the software and hardware used and we investigate whether the use of the novel mobile rehabilitation application provides clinically meaningful reassurance to patients during their cardiac rehabilitation. The trial also investigates whether physical and psychological measures improve using the system. This paper describes the mobile cardiac rehabilitation application as well as the setup of the trial.
Improving cardiac patients' medication compliance is a major factor in reducing mortality rate and reducing hospitalization rate. This paper describes a novel medication compliance management system. Its novelty lies in the combination of functionalities that helps the patient to comply with their medication regimen, together with a personal health monitoring system that monitors their health and collects vital signs data using a mobile phone and wirelss bio sensors. The system is designed to collect and analyse medication compliance, side effects and symptom responses and transfers the collected data in real time to a web based system for remote monitoring by caregivers and health professionals. Health professionals can use the system to assess the effect of the medication regimen on their patients' health and adapt it to reduce side effects and maximise the patient's wellbeing.
Abstractâ Remote ambulatory monitoring is widely seen as playing a key part in addressing the impending crisis in health care provision. We describe two mobile health solutions, one developed in the Netherlands and one in Australia. In both cases patientsâ biosignals are measured by means of body worn sensors which communicate wirelessly with a handheld device. Alarms and biosignals can be transmitted over wireless communication links to a remote location, and a remote health professional can view the biosignals via a web application. The clinical purposes are similar, however the technological approaches differ in some respects. We compare the two approaches and the experience gained working with a number of different patient groups and clinical specialties during trials in Europe and Australia.
This paper discusses the trial results of a personalised Cardiac Rhythm Management (CRM) system using a smart phone (PDA) and a wireless ECG sensor. The system is used in a trial to record and diagnose abnormal cardiac arrhythmias. This novel approach uses standard mobile phones, off-the-shelf ECG sensors and personalised feedback to the patient when compared to a conventional clinical Holter and event monitor systems. The preliminary results are discussed of an ongoing trial conducted with the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney Australia. The results indicate the viability of the system for commercial purposes.
This paper describes a personalised rehabilitation application using a smart phone (PDA) and wireless (bio) sensors. It instructs and motivates patients to follow their exercise programme and keeps track of their progress. It also monitors the relevant biosignals and provides immediate feedback to the patient. Sensors transmit data to the mobile phone where it is analysed locally and the data can also be instantaneously transmitted to a healthcare centre for remote monitoring by a health professional. The rehabilitation application is personalised for each cardiac patient and provides tailored advice (e.g. exercise more, slow down). A trial with a rehabilitation centre is in progress in which we investigate whether the personalised rehabilitation application improves the success of the rehabilitation programme in terms of patient compliance with recommended life style changes (such as increase physical activity or lose weight) and whether use of the system brings peace of mind to cardiac patients.
Leijdekkers, P, Gay, VC, Lawrence, EM & Barin, E 2009, 'A PDA-based software interface for remote vital sign monitoring: initial clinical experience', Europace 2009 Vol 11 (suppl 1) Pg 163, CardioRhythm, Europace, Hong Kong, pp. 163-164.
Telemonitoring is emerging as a compelling application of Body Area Networks (BANs). We describe two health BAN systems developed respectively by a European team and an Australian team and discuss some issues encountered relating to formalization of clinical knowledge to support realtime analysis and interpretation of BAN data. Our example application is an evidence-based telemonitoring and teletreatment application for home-based rehabilitation. The application is intended to support implementation of a clinical guideline for cardiac rehabilitation following myocardial infarction. In addition to this the proposal is to establish the patientâs individual baseline risk profile and, by real-time analysis of BAN data, continually re-assess the current risk level in order to give timely personalised feedback. Static and dynamic risk factors are derived from literature. Many sources express evidence probabilistically, suggesting a requirement for reasoning with uncertainty; elsewhere evidence requires qualitatie reasoning: both familiar modes of reasoning in KBSs. However even at this knowledge acquisition stage some issues arise concerning how best to apply the clinical evidence. Furthermore, in cases where insufficient clinical evidence is currently available, telemonitoring can yield large collections of clinical data with the potential for data mining in order to furnish more statistically powerful and accurate clinical evidence.
This paper describes a Ventricular Tachycardia/Fibrillation (VT/VF) detection algorithm that is specifically designed for a 24/7 personal wireless heart monitoring system. This monitoring system uses Bluetooth enabled bio-sensors and smart phones to monitor continuously cardiac patients vital signs. Our VT/VF algorithm is optimized for continuous real-time monitoring on smart phones with a high sensitivity and specificity. We studied and compared existing VT/VF algorithms and selected the one which suited best our requirements. However, we modified and improved the existing algorithm for the smart phone to achieve better performance results. We tested the algorithm on full-length signals from the physionet CU, MIT-db and MIT-vfdb databases  without any pre-selection of VT/VF or normal QRS-complex signals. We achieved 97% sensitivity, 98% accuracy and 98% specificity for our implementation which is excellent compared to existing algorithms.
Hecker, M, Leijdekkers, P & Gay, VC 2004, 'A Testbed for Ubiquitous Computing using Next Generation Mobile Networks', Proceedings of the 12th Collector Workshop on e-commerce Collector 2004, Collaborative Electronic Commerce Technology and Research, Collector Group, Adelaide, Australia, pp. 1-11.
Jorgensen, M, Leydekkers, P, Mampaey, M, Yang, H & SOC, IC 1997, 'Support for distributed multimedia services in the TINA architecture', THIRD INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON AUTONOMOUS DECENTRALIZED SYSTEMS - ISADS 97 - PROCEEDINGS, pp. 179-186.
Leydekkers, P, Gay, V & Franken, L 1995, 'A computational and engineering view on open distributed real-time multimedia exchange', Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), pp. 41-59.
© 2015, Springer Verlag. All rights reserved. An important requirement for distributed multimedia applications is the support of real-time communication and the means to specify real-time aspects. The aim of this paper is to extend RM-ODP and TINA-C computational and engineering views on distributed systems for the specification and support of real-time communication. It is expected that these bodies have a major impact in the area of distributed processing. However, concepts and mechanisms to support real-time communication are not yet fully included or detailed in these standards. In particular this paper addresses Quality of Service (QoS) specifications for continuous dataflows. These QoS specifications are described from the ODP computational and engineering viewpoint and the repercussions of these QoS specifications for functions located in both the computing and telecommunications environment are discussed.
Kwaaitaal, I, Leydekkers, P & Teunissen, LJ 1995, 'Good, the bad and the ugly about multimedia conferencing services', Proceedings of the International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems, pp. 235-241.
The good about Multimedia Conferencing (MMC) is that everybody likes to use it. The bad is that almost no standards or recommendations for MMC exist, and the ugly is that this situation prohibits the wide-spread availability of Multimedia Conferencing services. This article discusses problems and proposes solutions with respect to standardising MMC services. Some of the problems of existing MMC services is that most of them do not operate in a distributed multi-vendor heterogeneous environment. To operate in such an environment, as proposed by the TINA project, generic MMC interfaces should be specified. As a starting point for standardization specifications of the MMC operational interface, the Stream interface and the Management interface are given. The interfaces are specified from an information and computational viewpoint as defined by RM-ODP, using techniques like OMT and OMG IDL.
Leydekkers, P & Gay, V 1994, 'Multimedia conferencing services in an open distributed environment', Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), pp. 339-352.
© 1994, Springer Verlag. All rights reserved. Distributed Processing Environments (DPE) or platforms are regarded as the future telecommunication architecture  on which distributed applications such as Multimedia Conferencing (MMC) services will operate. Using the DPE as target telecommunication platform, an important issue for MMC designers is the specification of generic MMC interfaces. This enables MMC users to access, in a distribution transparent way, a wide range of MMC services, that conform to these interface specifications. This paper proposes a classification of MMC services by means of three generic interface templates. These interface templates describe in an implementation independent way the functionality and management related to MMC services. The paper discusses also a possible implementation of these interfaces. Techniques and concepts are used as proposed by RM-ODP  and TINA-C .
GAY, V, LEYDEKKERS, P & INTVELD, RH 1994, 'SPECIFICATION OF AUDIO VIDEO EXCHANGE BASED ON THE REFERENCE MODEL OF ODP', BROADBAND ISLANDS '94 - CONNECTING WITH THE END-USER, pp. 179-191.
Leijdekkers, P & Gay, V 2015, 'Combining Health and Fitness Data for a Better User-centred Digital Healthcare: There is an App for That!'.