Barbara Franz

Context-Enriched Personal Health Monitoring

Vital data measurement solely represents a snapshot of the patient’s condition. In case of deviant results health professionals can put them in relation to the daily constitution as well as the measurement circumstances and therefore interpret them accurately. Personal health telemonitoring actually provides no possibility for health professionals who interpret the recorded vital data to put them in relation with the context of the measurement and a patient’s daily activities. To tackle this contextual knowledge gap, we propose a personal health monitoring approach, which allows enriching measured vital data with contextual information from an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) system. Therefore, it is possible to provide additional information, like the person’s activity before or during the vital data measurement. Patients and caregivers, which process monitored health data, gain advantages and can improve care giving process. To demonstrate the benefits we use the two use cases (1) cardiac rehabilitation and (2) mobile nursing care.

Rule-Based Generation of Mobile User Interfaces

The popularity of mobile application platforms like IOS, Android or Windows Phone 7 increases from day to day. Affiliated app stores offer thousands of different applications (so called apps) for nearly any imaginable purpose. From a software developers point of view these app stores provide high potential: developers have the chance to reach the general public, thus having a much broader audience than with any other channel of distribution. Nevertheless, the increased amount of potential customers also increases expectations related to user experience. The user interface as the main interaction hub in mobile environments attracts a lot more attention. The success or failure of an app is often related to its user interface. Furthermore, users often demand the same user experience on different platforms. In order to allow for high quality in user interface development and to enable development for different platforms, a framework is presented that provides a platform independent definition of a user interface backed by constraints in form of rules. Using model driven development, the framework allows the creation of user interfaces that are not related to a specific target technology. Furthermore, it provides the ability to define a user interface and transform it into a destination user interface, whether this will be Android, iPhone or Windows Phone 7, with respect to given rules.

Analysis of Clinical Documents to Enable Semantic Interoperability

While there is a wealth of information available for each patient in an Electronic Health Record (EHR), information is not optimally organized for efficient use in patient care and there is still a large gap to achieve semantic and process interoperability. Current researches focus either on fully structured or non-structured clinical documents. A pre-analysis of 1000 real-world clinical documents showed, that most clinical documents are provided in a semi-structured way as level 2 HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) documents. Thus, an analysis framework is presented which also uses this semi-structure in combination with underlying models and metadata provided by the exchanging infrastructures, allowing summarization, comparison and integration of clinical information. The approach was tested using an IHE compliant EHR system. The analysis framework offers good response times and high accuracy levels. However, there is room for improvement considering processing of non-structured text and non-CDA documents.

IHE-Compliant Mobile Application for Integrated Home Healthcare of Elderly People

We present the current status and the interim results of our e-Care / e-Care Mobile project, which aims at better integration of home healthcare with institutional health-care (hospitals, nursing homes) through mobile devices. We develop a software system for such devices that enables access and update of healthcare records stored on an IHE-compliant server. We give details on the necessary adaptation of the healthcare workflow, usability aspects, and the generalization of our system through models. First results from pilot users are also presented.

e-Care IHE-Compliant Exchange of Patient Data to Enable Home & Mobile Nursing Care of Elderly People within an e-Care Affinity Domain

So far there is no connection between mobile nursing documents, documentation of nursing homes and care documentation of hospitals. Inadequate communication processes affect the quality of nursing care due to time delay and risk of errors due to repeated data entries, and therefore the quality of life for elderly people. In order to enable standardized processes and uniform communication between different systems, we develop common standards for nursing care as well as for the necessary processes. Also, we create an IT-infrastructure that is applicable to a wide range of different IT-supported care documentation systems, basing our approach on the IHE guidelines. Our system shall make care-relevant data for nursing care electronically accessible and therefore readily available to those who need it – anywhere and anytime.