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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:
- Documentation of potentially
effective telemedical services within home care and special apartments
for elderly. The different services will be categorised according to technical
and user oriented parameters such as mobility, user interface, bandwidth,
security etc. and prioritised in dialog with health care actors.
- Realisation and evaluation
of "e-services".A first technical part of the workpackage includes
realisation of a testplatform for diabetes care. Later, an application
will be developed including components for continuous monitoring of
physiological parameters and communication with a remote information system.
An essential part of the project will be analysis of changes in roles,
responsibilities and routines within the health care process as a consequence
of the new technique.
- Usability of mobile
terminals for home care visits including techniques for secure logon and authentication
with notebooks, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and WAP-telephones etc,
as well as techniques for secure communication of patient information between
mobile terminals and electronic patient record systems within for example
a primary health care centre.
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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