e-HealthCare
Advanced Home Healthcare Environment
You have reached the "start page"
of a research program that focuses on the applicability of new information
technology within a specific part of the health care sector; home based
care and other forms of healthcare that are not conducted within hospital
walls (such as mobile/ambulatory care).
There is an increasing interest
in finding ways of shifting health care resources from high cost hospitals
into morecost-effective forms while still preserving, or even increasing,
quality of care. Many patient groups are also getting more informed and
involved in their own care. The research tries to support these trends.
Several "parallel tracks"
Our approach to this research
field is to work along several parallel "tracks" that later will merge
in different ways. The first "track" focuses on the home based healthcare
environment and the second focuses on possibly interesting technologies
to be used to support health care in this environment. We believe that
several "tracks" are necessary in order to find the best solutions.
1. Investigation of needs
To be able to understand the
needs of new technology and IT-support within home health care, we are
investigating way of working and information flow within and between hospital-based
home care (Lasarettsansluten Hemsjukvård, LAH), primary health
care and community home health care in the region (County Council
of Östergötland). An article based on the first findings has
been submitted to Medinfo 2001.
-
Links will be published when
the article is available online...
2. Investigation of technology:
diabetes pilot application
In order to get practical experience
from home based care, distributed applications, usability and trust issues
we are developing a pilot application for diabetes care. We are basing
the application on different Java technologies, and will try to use several
different terminals for communication (phone,PC, PDA etc). The development
is done as an Open Source project under the LGPL-licence and it can be
monitored here at the project website. A first release of the software
is planned to June 9, 2001.
3. Investigation of technology:
heart- and lung-patient monitoring pilot application
As a result of the needs found
in track 1 (Investigation of needs) we have started a prestudy of a patient
monitoring application to be used in home environments. The exact details
are not specified as of this writing, but we are investigating the use
of an OSGi-based home gateway and portable instruments monitoring heart
rate, breathing, oxygen saturation, blood pressure etc. A wireless solution
is also investigated.
-
OSGi: http://www.osgi.org/
-
We plan to extract and reuse
useful components from track 2 (the diabetes application) into a common
platform, see: the Projects
subsection in in "WikiMed".
-
...
The projects are currently part of the e-Society programme:
Other starting points:
The
WikiMed tool is used for documentation of findings, interesting related
material and some project documentation (constantly under construction.)
A more detailed
description of the research in Linköping
The Medical Informatics division of the Department
of Biomedical Engineering at Linköping University is maintaining
this site.
Contact: erik.sundvall@imt.liu.se
Web hosting provided by http://sourceforge.net/