Research to set up an online system enabling doctors to access patients' health records from all across the European Union, has been launched.
The European Commission project, MyHealthAvatar, is designed to give people more knowledge and control of their health via their computers and mobile phones.
The programme will keep archives of each user's electronic health records, as well as store data about daily activities and family history. These combined factors, which may influence general health, would then be collated to predict and prevent potential diseases such as various forms of cancer.
It will also build a consistent continent-wide record of individual citizens enabling effective treatment should travellers become unwell anywhere in the EU.
The three year, 2.4 million Euro study is dedicated to developing novel approaches to provide a solution that offers access, collection, sharing and intelligent analysis of long-term and consistent personal health status data through an integrated digital representation in silico environment. This will help to deliver clinical analysis, prediction, prevention and treatment tailored to the individual subject.
The UK's University of Bedfordshire's Professor of Visual Computing, Feng Dong, is leading the scheme which is being worked on with a consortium of universities and hospitals around Europe, including the University of Lincoln (UK).
Professor Dong, who will be working with a team from the University's Centre for Computer Graphics and Visualisation, believes the avatar "could reshape the future of healthcare".
He said: "Although there have been similar projects to this in the past, we are hoping to learn from previous ideas which didn't quite work to make MyHealthAvatar successful. I think one of the key issues is to make it people friendly and for it to be easy-to-use. Most of the data for the Avatar will come from the system itself and there is very little for the user to actually insert, or do.
"With today's technology it is possible to use a person's information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook to give us more details about a patient. With mobile phone tagging it is also possible for the system to show where the patient has been. So for example if they are regularly in the pub, it could suggest to the user that they are drinking too much.