the
Gazette
Issue nr. 1, April 2006, Guest editor: METU
Editorial: “the innovation resides on the integration”.................................................... 1
Learn more about the Middle East Technical University and the Software R&D
Center)............................................................................................................................ 3
Interview with the boss .................................................................................................. 5
State of the art: Saphire in the world ............................................................................. 9
Cultural links................................................................................................................ 13
Editorial: “the innovation resides on the integration”
Dear friends,
The Saphire proposal had been submitted by 2005, under the 4th Call Priority
concerning strengthening the integration of the ICT research effort in an enlarged
Europe, and with a focus on eHealth.
The evaluators recognized that “given the topic of cardiac diseases and the addressed
population, the potential impact could be strong, since such diseases in new member
states are increasing and previous studies on monitoring patients give positive
results”.
As far as the proposed tools and technologies are concerned, these were found to be
convincing, while our overall approach was found realistic as we intend to use
existing sensor technologies. And I can only agree with the evaluators that expressed
their agreement on the fact that “the innovation resides on the integration”.
Not long time before, Forrester Research was identifying that “the integration
market landscape is shifting” and that “Service-oriented architectures, business
process management (BPM), composite applications, and other new application
requirements have become the driving force in the market” (market overview of
December 2004, “Integration Landscape 2005”).
The picture is similarly positively assessed by Gartner as only “in 2004, the
application integration, middleware and portal market in the EMEA region (Europe,
Middle East and Africa) grew by 7.4 percent, reaching $2 billion”. (Gartner Inc.,
Market Trends: Application Integration, Middleware and Portal Software, EMEA,
2004-2009, December 2005)
Our SAPHIRE project concerns the provision of an innovative infrastructure to
support integration and service interoperability in the fields of intelligent healthcare
monitoring and medical decision support.
It aims to develop such an infrastructure integrating the various wireless medical
sensor data with hospital information systems.
Our developments will be deployed in two pilot applications:
 one for homecare monitoring of cardiovascular patients in Germany, and
 one to monitor cardiovascular patients in a hospital in Romania.
To subscribe to critical data delivery, clinicians will simply use a Web-based program
indicating desired alerts, thresholds, delivery methods (sms/e-mail/Web/pager) or to
build a patient coverage list. Once subscribed, clinicians will immediately receive
clinical notifications and reminders.
Creating such an information infrastructure requires safeguards to maintain security
and privacy of patient data. In Saphire we propose such a comprehensive security and
privacy mechanism to complement the infrastructure proposed. While providing these
confidentiality and privacy facilities, the EU directives presenting the general
principles of processing of personal data are taken into account.
I shall refer to the same source of Forrester stating that “the ultimate goal of an
integration strategy should still be to rationalize integration infrastructure to the
smallest number of broad platforms that meet business requirements.” Resources are
scarce and it is therefore that we need to provide the means for achieving excellence
in well-selected areas. This principle holds for both the academia and the industry. In
this respect my team at SRDC-METU has invested in developing a more-thansufficient know-how on what we broadly refer to as “semantic interoperability”.
Medicine is one of the few domains to have some domain knowledge in a computable
form and I consider this as an extremely attractive asset which we shall exploit in the
Saphire project for defining the semantics of the different services.
A last word for my User partners: I am extremely happy to have together with us on
board two exceptionally good User partners, namely
 the Schüchtermann-Schiller'sche Kliniken at Bad Rothenfelde in Germany
which is a world-renowned specialized clinic for cardiovascular diseases,
and
 the Department of Internal Medicine and Cardiology of the Emergency
Hospital of Bucharest that is an academic clinic of the “Carol Davila”
University of Medicine and Pharmacy at Bucharest and also an emergency
and tertiary center of Cardiology with an extremely high standard activity
in clinical and academic work.
Having User partners that are both motivated and well-positioned in their particular
areas is a strong asset for our project and we are happy to collaborate with them.
Both me personally and my SAPHIRE project team shall remain at your disposal for
any information you might wish to have.
Kind regards,
Prof. Dr. Asuman Dogac
Director SRDC
IST Project SAPHIRE Coordinator
Learn more about the Middle East Technical
University and the Software R&D Center)
The Middle East Technical University (METU) (http://www.metu.edu.tr) is the
leading technical university in Turkey.
The
Software
Research
and
Development
Center
(SRDC)
(http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr) is established by the Scientific and Technical Research
Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) in October 1991 and is operating under the Faculty of
Engineering in METU.
METU-SRDC is involved in a number of research and development projects
supported by the government, industrial companies, international organizations and
the European Commission.
METU-SRDC has expertise on Semantic Web Technologies, Web Services,
Ontologies, P2P networks, Agent Technologies, Semantic Interoperability, e-Health,
Sensor Networks, GRID Systems. This research institute is formed with the following
mission statement;
“Our mission is to combine knowledge, hard work and enthusiasm in the
areas of electronic business and Internet technologies to be able to contribute
to the research and development activities in Turkey, and in EU by exploiting
the outstanding young potential of Turkey.”
For this aim, METU-SRDC is utilizing the great potential in METU, especially in the
Information Technologies field.
As METU-SRDC is operating with the Computer Engineering department, there is a
great human resource potential both for part-time and full-time employees.
With the provided summer practice options, students can have a chance to feel the
R&D soul and the enthusiastic ones can continue as the part-time employees during
their undergraduate studies.
After finalizing the undergraduate studies, it is served an option as a full-time
employment while continuing their graduate studies parallel with the research &
development issues in the center.
Graduate students can finalize their master thesis or PhD thesis with their research &
development work in the METU-SRDC.
It has been achieved over 75 master/PhD thesis in parallel with the researches in
METU-SRDC. Furthermore, it has been published 98 articles about the research
achieved in METU-SRDC since 1994.
METU-SRDC is also a great potential to provide the academy-industry collaboration.
METU has a techno polis (http://www.metutech.metu.edu.tr/) in its campus with
various IT companies and over 1400 employee power.
METU-SRDC collaborates with industrial companies from this region in research
projects to maximize the academy-industry collaborative work.
METU Techno Polis
R&D Projects in METU-SRDC
METU-SRDC is involved in a number of research and development projects
supported by the government, industrial companies, international organisations and
the European Commission.
Apart from the local projects supported by the Turkish State Planning Organisation,
the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) and by METU,
METU-SRDC has:
 realised a part of the prototype for AWACS Man-Machine Interface
Prototype for NATO Mid-Term Modernisation Programme in co-operation
with Gallium Software Inc. (Canada);
 developed a health care information system which has been successfully
commercialized in Turkey.
METU-SRDC has experience in developing large scale software projects: METU
Interoperable DBMS (MIND) Project is a multi-database system based on OMG's
distributed object management architecture.
METU Object-Oriented DBMS (MOOD) Project is an object-oriented DBMS
prototype.
METU-SRDC has successfully completed several European Commission supported
projects, including, INCO-DC 97 2496 MARIFlow project (as a Scientific and
Technical Coordinator of the project) and IST-1999-20216 LEVER (as a
subcontractor), IST-2000-26429 HERMES project (as the scientific and technical
coordinator), IST-2000-31050 Agent Academy (as a partner), and IST-2000-31046
HUMANTEC (as a partner), EUMEDIS MEDFORIST (as a partner). MARIFlow
project has produced an inter enterprise workflow management system for data and
control flow over the Internet. METU-SRDC has recently produced an ebXML
compliant e-Business infrastructure prototype.
Currently METU-SRDC is the coordinator of the following four projects in FP6 IST
program:
 IST-1-002104-STP SATINE: Semantic-based Interoperability Infrastructure
for Integrating Web Service Platforms to Peer-to-Peer Networks
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IST-1-002103-STP ARTEMIS:
A Semantic Web Service-based P2P
Infrastructure for the Interoperability of Medical Information Systems
IST-4-027074-STP SAPHIRE: Intelligent Healthcare Monitoring based on a
Semantic Interoperability Platform
IST-4-027065-CA RIDE: A Roadmap for Interoperability of eHealth Systems
in Support of COM 356 with Special Emphasis on Semantic Interoperability
Additionally, METU-SRDC has partner roles on the following ongoing projects:
 EUMEDIS DAEDALUS: Delivery of Mediterranean Destination Links in
Unified Environments
 IST-3-015871-SSA IST-BONUS: Identify and Support Research and Business
Excellence to Enhance NMS - ACC Participation in the Development and
Pilot Implementation-Demonstration of ICT Business Applications and
Services
 IST-4-027306-STP ABILITIES: Application Bus for InteroperabiLITy In
enlarged Europe SMEs
Interview with the boss
Saphire Gazette: Prof. Dogac, looking at its title, Saphire is about “Intelligent
Healthcare Monitoring based on a Semantic Interoperability Platform”. How should
we understand this in some relation to our own lives and some practical situations?
Prof Dogac: By intelligent healthcare monitoring we mean the patient follow-up and
monitoring especially in remote locations through computerized decision support
systems. With the aging society, the remote monitoring of patients becomes a must
both to decrease the cost, and the load of general practitioners and serve better
healthcare services to the patients. The Saphire Project aims to monitor the vulnerable
patients by specific guidelines. The wireless sensors which are gently located over the
patient, measures the intended medical values; such as blood pressure, ECG, heart
rate, oxygen saturation of blood. The clinical guidelines are executed through a
clinical decision support system in a proactive manner for any abnormal case reported
by the medical sensors. The decision support system also retrieves patient’s previous
medical history from the hospitals where the patient has been previously hospitalized.
If some abnormal situation is detected by the decision support system, the identified
stakeholders who can be doctors, nurses or patient relatives are informed about the
status of the patient immediately.
Gazette: One of the points you raise in the description of the project is that “the
medical practitioners at all levels are becoming more overloaded as the aging
population of Europe increases”. What is your position? I.e. is this a social problem
with economic implications and the Community should address it with an appropriate
mix of services, technologies and infrastructures? And: how should we expect Saphire
to contribute to the current situation?
Dogac: The European population is getting older and the average life span is getting
longer. It is a fact that while people getting older, the possibility to encounter chronic
diseases increases. All of these facts directly affect the healthcare domain: the cost of
treatment increases, and so does the load of general practitioners. Thus remote
monitoring especially for the patients living at their homes has a key role to reduce
the costs and to provide better services. Saphire enables to follow up the patients from
their homes through wireless medical sensors and clinical decision support system
which will lead to a reduction of medical costs by also cutting down rehospitalisation
procedures in future.
Gazette: In many cases, and not necessarily in the context of the new member
countries, it is difficult to apply an advanced solution concept because of
shortcomings in the underlying infrastructures and the people’s and domain experts
attitude. Is this holding also for the case of Saphire?
Dogac: The infrastructure has an important role to apply and execute systems for
remote healthcare monitoring because it is necessary to transmit sensor data between
the remote points such as homes, and healthcare centres such as hospitals or clinics.
The communication within the end points mainly between the sensors and interfaces
for outer transmission can be handled with Bluetooth standard which is independent
from the main public data infrastructure. For the data transmissions between the
remote care endpoints and healthcare centres the basic internet infrastructure is
enough which exists in all European Countries; such as cablenet, ADSL. Hence we do
not think that the underlying infrastructure is an obstacle for Saphire.
We aim to gain the support of domain experts through two pilot applications that will
be realized in real life settings. We hope that through these pilot applications the
healthcare practitioners will see the direct benefits of the Saphire System.
Gazette: There is a big number of projects that are lacking resources or willingness
to make the extra mile which would bring them to a scientific breakthrough or a
commercial success. Which are the envisaged goals from your side in Saphire?
Dogac: Saphire project addresses a problem that has not yet been solved in healthcare
domain: seamless integration of medical sensor data and electronic healthcare records
of the patient for remote healthcare monitoring. We aim to publish the end results of
Saphire through highly credible scientific journals to disseminate our results to the
scientific community. Also through our pilot applications that will be realized in real
life settings, we aim to attract industry, and increase our exploitation opportunities.
Gazette: In the project you collaborate closely with medical doctors. For sure there
might be some communication challenges as you don’t have the same background and
use different languages. Is this as difficult as it seems to be? How are you going to
cope with this?
Dogac: Medical doctors have a key role in the Saphire Project where they will shape
the clinical guidelines to be used in the system. The effectiveness of clinical
guidelines is vital for the general performance and efficiency of the Saphire System.
These healthcare guidelines will be structured by the medical doctors and will be
coded into the system by technical partners, so there is a high interaction and
dependency between the medical doctors and the technical partners. However we
hope that this issue will not create a problem, since the technical partners and the
medical doctors will start studying together right in the beginning of the project
through the requirements analysis and design phases of the Saphire System.
Furthermore, the partners in the Saphire Project have expertise in eHealth domain
with various projects.
Gazette: Many projects solve a problem – but it is difficult to replicate the process
and provide a solution either to the industry or to the end users. What is your view on
this? How is Saphire going to cope with this matter?
Dogac: We aim to base the Saphire architecture according to the requirements of our
end users. Right from the beginning of the project we will do our best to create an
infrastructure that can be used in real life settings, and will demonstrate the benefits of
the system through real life pilot applications. We hope that this effort will increase
the chance of an industry uptake.
Gazette: In the project you take a dual approach by means of addressing the
requirements of both an in-hospital solution to monitor cardiovascular patients in a
hospital in Romania, and a second one for homecare monitoring of cardiovascular
patients in Germany. Why? Do you see a potential in both cases, or is it part of some
need to examine closer any deficiencies of the two approaches?
Dogac: To prove the applicability of the solutions we have chosen two different
settings: homecare and in-hospital monitoring. This is because that the requirements
of these two settings are very different. Saphire architecture aims to cover both of
these requirements, since it aims to provide a generic solution for remote intelligent
healthcare monitoring.
Gazette: Let’s talk about standards: in the last years you have personally
participated in standardization activities and have personally contributed as author.
On the other hand, you make use of existing de facto and industry standards in the
area of Semantic Web and interoperability. What is the ‘perfect mix’ for a company
or an organization to cope with the issue of standards in the Saphire area?
Dogac: Saphire project will built upon already existing standards in diverse domains
in covers, such as OWL, GLIF, HL7 CDA, EHRCom, FIPA and so on. However we
aim to contribute to these standards, by sharing our experiences in applying these
standards to a specific healthcare problem: remote healthcare monitoring, and also to
propose necessary extensions to these standards when necessary.
Gazette: Currently, there are ongoing initiatives at the international level in the area
of Saphire. Can you name some of them that you feel are interesting to watch or even
to develop synergies with them?
Dogac: Saphire Project is interested in some projects with similar objectives and with
which synergies can be developed. The projects can be stated as followings;
1. MyHeart (IST 507816,
http://www.extra.research.philips.com/euprojects/myheart/) which is an Integrated
Project, funded by the IST programme.
2. The MobiHealth (IST-2001-36006, http://www.mobihealth.org/) which provides
a Java service platform for mobile healthcare.
3. HEARTS (IST-2001-37403, http://heartsproject.datamat.it/hearts) project whose
main aim is to develop techniques for early detection of myocardial ischaemia
from the ECG signals.
4. The ARTEMIS (http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/webpage/projects/artemis) project
which is currently developing a semantic Web services based interoperability
framework for the healthcare domain.
5. U-R-SAFE (IST-2001-33352, http://ursafe.tesa.prd.fr/) project whose aim is to
have the elderly person wear medical measuring devices, all connected via short
range Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) to a central, portable electronic
unit, the Personal Base Station.
6. CASCOM project whose aim is to implement, validate, and trial a value-added
supportive infrastructure for Semantic Web based business application services
across mobile and fixed networks.
7. SerAPI is a research and development project in Finland, which focuses on the
utilisation of Service-oriented architecture and Web Service technologies for
information system and application integration needs in healthcare.
8. AINGERU is a proposal for a new way of tele assistance for elderly people. Its
goal is to overcome the weaknesses that present most of the teleassistance services
offered nowadays. AINGERU takes benefit from the new advances in the areas of
networking (wireless communications), mobile computing (Personal Digital
Assistants) and semantic web and agent technologies to accomplish its goal. This
project is been developed by the BDI Group (http://siul02.si.ehu.es/) and the work
is mainly supported by the University of the Basque Country, Diputación Foral de
Gipuzkoa (cosupported by the European Social Fund) and CICYT [TIN200407999-C02-00].
Gazette: Business process integration and service interoperability exhibit a ubiquity
in terms that problems related to their lack appear in virtually any application
domain. Why do you make an investment in terms of focusing to the area of e-Health?
Dogac: You are right, business process integration and service interoperability can be
applied in many domains, however each domain has its own specific problems to be
addressed, and semantics is domain knowledge hence these research problems should
be applied in a domain specific manner. Also healthcare domain is a very complex
domain, where these technologies can help us to tackle some of the unsolved
problems in healthcare domain.
Gazette: You are also the Coordinator of another IST Project in the same area of eHealth. As we know, the ARTEMIS project is approaching its completion – do you
consider that there is a bridge between these two projects that can exhibit some
positive impact?
Dogac: As you have stated, the Saphire Project is mainly built upon the results of a
European commission funded project, IST-1-002103 Artemis. Artemis is developing
a semantic web service-based P2P Infrastructure for the Interoperability of Medical
Information Systems. Artemis project enables the Healthcare Institutes to exchange
Electronic Healthcare Records in interoperable manner through semantically enriched
web services and semantic mediation. The Saphire Project will exploit these results by
integrating the patient data collected through wireless medical sensor devices with the
hospital information systems. This infrastructure will constitute the interoperability
base for the intelligent healthcare monitoring system.
State of the art: Saphire in the world
The SAPHIRE project mainly utilizes various current state-of-the-art technologies.
Wireless medical sensor devices is one of them; by which it is possible to obtain
measurements of heart rate, oxygen saturation, end-tidal CO2, and serum chemistries,
including serum glucose, with small, non-invasive sensors.
Companies such as Nonin (http://www.nonin.com/Products/products.html) and
Numed (http://www.numed.on.ca/home.htm) have developed wireless vital sign
sensors based on Bluetooth technology, while Radianse (http://www.radianse.com/)
has developed an RF-based location-tracking system.
Another important technology which is crucial for the SAPHIRE System is the Web
Service. Web Services have been described as the third phase of the Internet. In the
first phase communications over the Internet were mainly through static content. In
the second phase there was a degree of dynamic content creation. In the third, Web
services phase, Internet is becoming a global common platform where organizations
and individuals communicate among each other to carry out various commercial
activities and to provide value-added services. The dynamic enterprise and dynamic
value chains become achievable and even mandatory for competitive advantage.
Currently, describing the semantic of Web in general, and semantic of Web services
in particular are very active research areas. World Wide Web Consortium has started
the initiative to develop Semantic Web and a semantic markup language for
publishing and sharing ontologies, namely Web Ontology Language (OWL), is being
developed for this purpose. OWL is derived from DAML+OIL
(http://www.w3.org/2001/10/ daml+oil) by incorporating learnings from the design
and application use of DAML+OIL. It builds upon the Resource Description
Framework (http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-schema, http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdfsyntax).
When healthcare information is transferred between two different Electronic
Healthcare Record (EHR) systems, it is essential that the clinical meaning expressed
by the original author within a set of record entries is faithfully preserved and
presented by the receiving system, even though this may have internal system
architecture different from that of the sending system.
A number of EHR standards and frameworks have been developed to assist with the
interoperability and integration of distributed EHR information. Ideally, all EHR
systems would adopt common and systematized hierarchies of component names, use
multi-lingual clinical coding systems with perfect cross-mappings and use identical
reference models for measurements.
However, this has not been realized yet. Not only do a number of international health
information standards exist, such as CEN ENV 13606, HL7 and GEHR, but each
country, state, division, hospital and vendor usually has their own “standard clinical
data model”. Therefore the SAPHIRE Project is adopting the semantically enriched
Web service approach to provide the interoperability of sensor systems and medical
information systems.
Another state of the art topic is the agent technology which is also mandatory for
SAPHIRE Project. An agent is a software entity that can perform information-related
tasks without ongoing human supervision. In the recent years, agent technology has
found many interesting applications in decision support systems and internet
applications.
As the benefits of using agents in such applications become clear, numerous agent
development platforms have emerged with various degrees of abstraction and
completeness ranging from bare-bones API's to full-fledged but less flexible building
packages.
These frameworks all have their strong points and lacking features, the most
important factors being compliance to a specification (e.g. FIPA), support for the
mobility of the agents from host to host, support for lightweight agents, support for
advanced planning-scheduling and combinations thereof. An Inference Engine is a
software tool that emulates the human capability to arrive at a conclusion by
reasoning and complements agent software.
Due to the progress of the Information Society during the last couple of years the
ability to easily gather and monitor personal data has improved dramatically. Several
directives, recommendations, laws, and standards concerning these topics have been
published at European level in recent years. These documents have in common that
they are related to the protection of personal data against processing and that they
formulate conditions and rules under which the processing is allowed and how
processing may be carried out.
On the technological side, developing security and privacy mechanisms for sensor
networks is still an active research area. Since sensor devices have limited
computational and communications resources, it becomes impractical to use currently
available security algorithms, since they were designed for powerful processors.
Security and privacy mechanisms designed specifically for sensor data and network
protocols are needed.
Alternative cryptographic primitives and the security protocols in the sensor networks
should be adapted. Security in sensor networks is mainly avoiding adversaries read
and tamper sensor data. Basic wireless communication is also not secure. Because it is
broadcast, any adversary can eavesdrop on traffic, inject new messages, and replay
old messages. Hence, it is not possible to rely on trust assumptions on the
communication infrastructure of wireless sensor networks.
On the other hand, Security and Privacy standards for Web Services are now
emerging based on the WS-Security roadmap (http://www106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-secroad/).
The key industry leaders such as IBM and Microsoft established a family of security
specifications for web services. These specifications are designed to work together to
provide a comprehensive and extensible web services security infrastructure.
In addition to all, there are some wireless medical sensor based projects on the market
which are;
 Intel (http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20040316corp.htm) is
investing in research and development of sensor networks, recognizing this
technology as crucial to addressing the pending global age wave and public health
crises. For this purpose, on March 16, 2004, Intel Corporation gave US
government officials a first-hand look at future in-home healthcare applications at
a technology demonstration hosted today by the Center for Aging Services
Technologies (CAST).
 Motorola and Partners Telemedicine, a service of Harvard Teaching Hospitals,
on the 28th of September 2004, announced a collaboration to test
MOTOHEALTH, a Motorola solution that uses mobile phones to help healthcare
providers monitor chronically ill patients as they go about their normal daily
routines.
(http://www.motorola.com/mediacenter/news/detail/0,,4723_4023_23,00.html). It
is stated that when MOTOHEALTH solution is implemented into a
comprehensive healthcare program, can give healthcare providers useful, daily
updates on a patient’s physiological levels such as blood pressure, glucose level,
and weight. It is indicated that this will facilitate proactive treatment action,
resulting in fewer hospitalizations and visits to emergency rooms, potentially
lowering healthcare costs.
 CodeBlue Project (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/vitaldust/) is
exploring applications of wireless sensor network technology to pre-hospital and
in-hospital emergency care. It is designed to provide routing, naming, discovery,
and security for wireless medical sensors, PDAs, PCs, and other devices that may
be used to monitor and treat patients in a range of medical settings. CodeBlue
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scales across a wide range of network densities, ranging from sparse clinic and
hospital deployments to very dense, ad hoc deployments at a mass casualty site.
The US Military Operational Medicine Research Program, under its War
Fighter Physiologic Status Monitoring – Initial Capability (WPSM-IC) program is
developing what is essentially a wellness monitor for each soldier. This system is
comprised of a medical hub which hosts a personal area network of physiologic
and wireless medical sensors and a number of algorithms. The algorithms estimate
the state of the war fighter in the following areas: Thermal, Hydration, Cognitive,
Life Signs, and Wound Detection.
CareMedia Project at Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/caremedia/) uses computer vision techniques
to track the progress of patients and staff at a skilled nursing facility for patients
with advanced dementia. The shortage of geriatric care professionals, the growth
of the elderly population, and the societal benefits of improving quality of life and
care in skilled nursing facilities underscore the need for CareMedia: automated
video and sensor analysis for geriatric care.
Project Nightingale (http://www.supercomputingonline.com/print.php?sid=6748)
at the University of Sydney, Australia, is aiming to develop a context-aware data
management system across a suite of personal computing devices with an applied
focus on applications that stimulate intellectual and social fitness in the elderly.
The project's goal is to substitute the classic desktop interface with invisible and
ambient interfaces that let individuals or groups engage in reminiscence-oriented
group activities.
The Smart Medical Home Research Laboratory
(http://www.futurehealth.rochester.edu/ smart_home/) at the University of
Rochester, USA, is aiming to develop an integrated Personal Health System, so all
technologies are integrated and work seamlessly. This technology will allow
consumers, in the privacy of their own homes, to maintain health, detect the onset
of disease, and manage disease. The data collected 24/7 inside the home will
augment the data collected by healthcare professionals and hospitals. The data
collection modules in the home will start with the measurement of traditional vital
signs (blood pressure, pulse, respiration).
There are also some other IST Projects which are in the European region and have
similar field with SAPHIRE Project;
 MyHeart (IST 507816,
http://www.extra.research.philips.com/euprojects/myheart/), is an Integrated
Project, funded by the IST programme. MyHeart aims fighting cardio-vascular
diseases (CVD) by preventive lifestyle and early diagnosis. Its objective is to
develop “functional clothes” together with integrated electronics which are
considered as intelligent clothes. Intelligent clothes will contain novel sensors and
electronics with intelligent algorithms that are integrated into the garments,
allowing monitoring and evaluating the health status of a person and reacting on
it.
 The MobiHealth (IST-2001-36006, http://www.mobihealth.org/) provides a Java
service platform for mobile healthcare. It enables remote monitoring of patients
using 2.5/3G public wireless infrastructures. The major components of the
MobiHealth system are the Body Area Network, the Back-end system and the
end-user system. Patient data is collected using a Body Area Network (BAN). A
healthcare practitioner can view and analyze the patient data from a remote
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location. The back-end system is the software system that registers the incoming
signals and makes them available for further processing. MobiHeath project has
focused on the infrastructure of the sensor network.
AMON (IST-2000-25239, http://www.medictouch.net/AMON/index.htm) system
is a wearable personal monitor medical device that evaluates human vital signs
using advanced bio-sensors. The system gathers and analyzes the vital information
and then transmits the data to a remote telemedicine centre, for further analysis
and emergency care, using cellular infrastructure. AMON-WMD utilizes built-in
medical algorithms for routine primary evaluation.
The main objective of HEARTS (IST-2001-37403,
http://heartsproject.datamat.it/hearts) project is to develop techniques for early
detection of myocardial ischaemia from the ECG signals. The system has a
decision support module which analyses data using neural network processing
technology. It obtains anytime information about health status related to the
specific subject and the specific context.
The ARTEMIS project is currently developing a semantic Web services based
interoperability framework for the healthcare domain.
The aim of U-R-SAFE (IST-2001-33352, http://ursafe.tesa.prd.fr/) project is to
have the elderly person wear medical measuring devices, all connected via short
range Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) to a central, portable electronic
unit, the Personal Base Station.
Mobi-Dev project aims to allow clinical staff with portable devices (based on
palm PCs) to wirelessly connect to different information databases, able to
perform real time data management. The project uses the smart card technology to
permit electronic signing of input data with legal validity all over Europe;
Bluetooth connection to permit the use of Mobi-Dev inside the hospitals;
GPRS/UMTS connection to permit the use of the system for transmitting large
amounts of data and natural language understanding to allow the users to enter
data into structured databases, simply speaking to the palm PC.
In fact,
Mobi-Dev project is using a palm PC to access the data in a Hospital Information
System (HIS). Sensors and data coming from sensors are out of the scope of the
project.
The main objective of the CASCOM project is to implement, validate, and trial a
value-added supportive infrastructure for Semantic Web based business
application services across mobile and fixed networks. The primary field of
validation of the project work is the telemedicine domain and the on-the-fly
coordination of pervasive healthcare services.
Saphire project will built upon these state of the are technologies and research
projects and provide an intelligent healthcare monitoring platform based on
semantically enriched clinical guidelines, which has not been achieved yet.
Cultural links
The Official site of the Ministry of Tourism of Turkey ( click on the picture to
activate the link)
Access to museums and cultural links in Turkey… ( click on the picture to activate
the link)
Turkish cuisine and recipes ( click on the picture to activate the link)
Tourism in Turkey ( click on the picture to activate the link)
Impressum
The Saphire Gazette is a quarterly publication of the Saphire
project for dissemination purposes. Saphire is a Specific Targeted
Research Project (STREP) co-financed by the European Commission
and the Sixth Framework Programme, under Priority 2.4.13 for
“Strengthening the Integration of the ICT research effort in an
Enlarged Europe” Focus: eHealth. Project full title is: Intelligent
Healthcare Monitoring based on a Semantic Interoperability
Platform. Contract no.: IST-27074. Project start: January 2006.
Project duration: 30 months. Project web site:
http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/webpage/projects/saphire