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e-HealthCare

Advanced Home Healthcare Environment

Details about the research in Linköping, Sweden.

Introduction

Over the last years there has been a tremendous development within the field of telecommunication with Internet based services in the forefront breaking through in almost every sector of society. For the coming years the development of mobile Internet promise to bring communication services even closer to daily life, and the development of new Internet based services will be an expanding market for different service providers. One sector especially suited for development of new telecommunication services is the health care sector.

There has for long been an interest in different telemedicine applications, typically communication of patient information between a remote small hospital or primary health care centre and a specialist clinic. But the large-scale breakthrough of computer based patient records and thereby also communication of patient related information between different actors within the health care sector has in spite of the technical development been more troublesome than many expected.

The current research program focuses on the applicability of new telecommunication services within a specific part of the health care sector; home based care. There are several reasons for this choice; there is an increasing interest in finding ways of shifting health care resources from high cost hospitals into more cost-effective forms while still preserving, or even increasing, quality of care. In terms of need for techniques facilitating patient information communication between different levels of the health care organisation, home care and related units are highly prioritised areas.

The project will contain the following tentative work packages:

Co-ordinator for the Linköping part of the project:Hans Åhlfeldt, hans.ahlfeldt@imt.liu.se

Currently ongoing project work

We are currently working along several parallel tracks that later will merge. 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 both 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 onthe first findings has been submitted to Medinfo 2001.

Main contact: Leili Lind, leili@imt.liu.se

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 at the project website:  http://ehealth.sourceforge.net. A first release of the software is planned to June 9, 2001.

Main contact: Erik Sundvall, erik.sundvall@imt.liu.se

3. Investigation of technology: heart-patient monitoring pilot application

As a result of the needs found in track 1 (Investigation of needs) we have just started a prestudy of a heart-patient monitoring application to be used in home environments. The exact details are not specified as of this writing, but we are considering the use of an OSGi-based home gateway and portable instruments monitoring heart rate, breathing, saturation etc. A wireless solution (possibly based on Bluetooth) is investigated.

Main contacts:  Leili Lind, leili@imt.liu.se and Erik Sundvall, erik.sundvall@imt.liu.se

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