Chronic heart failure (CHF) is among the major causes of hospitalization for elderly citizens. Its considerable impact on patient quality of life, the resources congestion, and the related costs can be efficiently mitigated using remote wireless biosensors networks placed at patient home, able to communicate in secure way over the public Internet with the cardiology departmental Hospital Information System (HIS). In this way, physicians can monitor the situation of several patients at distance and quickly realize and act alterations in vital parameters. In this scenario, the Health@Home (H@H) platform is conceived. The pool of Bluetooth sensors enables patients to daily collect vital signs at home in noninvasive fashion. A home gateway receives and processes all signals before sending them to a server node in charge of interfacing with the usual HIS. The novel concept of operating protocol (OP) represents a list of actions, remotely configurable, that the domestic network has to follow (required measurements, transmissions, comparisons with personalized thresholds, etc.). The first medical tests on 30 patients (1 month) allowed to verify the model, both from the patient and the medical perspective. The main evaluation metrics were usability, flexibility, and reliability of the communication from sensors to HIS. 1. Introduction Chronic heart failure represents one of the most relevant chronic diseases in all industrialized countries, affecting approximately 20 million people in Europe and US [1–3]. The hospital admissions, mainly concentrated in the older adults segment, range from a prevalence of 1.5% to 8.4% in 65–74 years and 75 years or older groups, respectively [2]. Admissions to hospital with heart failure have significantly doubled in the last 20 years [1]. Despite the advancements in medical and pharmacological fields, CHF continues to increase in both prevalence and incidence, with 4 million new cases each year in Europe and US, as result of the general ageing of population [4]. To address the societal and economical issues posed by the hospital admissions due to CHF [5] (2% of the total healthcare expenditure [6, 7], with hospitalizations that represent more than two-thirds of such expenditure [3]), the introduction of cost-efficient healthcare services/treatments is required, in particular preventive strategies aiming at more effective outpatient follow-up management programs [8]. It is acknowledged that the current healthcare model based on periodic visits, usually monthly, leads to a high re-hospitalization rate (25% within 30 days and 45%
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