P. Katrakazas Panagiotis Katrakazas is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at the National Technical University of Athens, since November 2014. He holds a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. He is also IT Associate in the Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering of the School of Civil Engineering. He was Project Manager of the team tasked with electronic registration of the Agricultural Insurance Organization pensions at the Hellenic Post (2010 – 2011). He prepares and teaches the undergraduate courses “Measurements and Controls in Biomedical Engineering” and “Biomedical Technology Laboratory”, and the postgraduate course “Signals and Systems” in the Master of Science in Audiology-Neurotology programme at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens. His scientific specialization and interests include Acoustics, Noise Control, Medical Information Systems, Data Mining and Biomedical Technology. He has authored/co-authored 16 articles in peer-reviewed conferences, and 3 chapters in peer-reviewed books.
The holistic management of hearing loss (HL) requires appropriate public health policies for HL prevention, early diagnosis, long-term treatment and rehabilitation; detection and prevention of cognitive decline; protection from noise; and socioeconomic inclusion of HL patients. However, currently the evidential basis for forming such policies is limited. Holistic HL management policies require the analysis of heterogeneous data, including Hearing Aid (HA) usage, noise episodes, audiological, physiological, cognitive, clinical and medication, personal, behavioural, life style, occupational and environmental data. To utilise these data in forming holistic HL management policies, EVOTION, a new European research and innovation project, aims to develop an integrated platform supporting: (a) the analysis of related datasets to enable the identification of causal and other effects amongst them using various forms of big data analytics, (b) policy decision making focusing on the selection of effective interventions related to the holistic management of HL, based on the outcomes of (a) and the formulation of related public health policies, and (c) the specification and monitoring of such policies in a sustainable manner. In this paper, we describe the EVOTION approach.