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Managing chronic disease through automated systems has the potential to both benefit the patient and reduce health-care costs. We have developed and evaluated a disease management system for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Its aim is to predict and detect exacerbations and, through this, help patients self-manage their disease to prevent hospitalisation.

The carefully crafted intelligent system consists of a mobile device that is able to collect case-specific, subjective and objective, physiological data, and to alert the patient by a patient-specific interpretation of the data by means of probabilistic reasoning. Collected data are also sent to a central server for inspection by health-care professionals.

We evaluated the probabilistic model using cross-validation and ROC analyses on data from an earlier study and by an independent data set …