EFMI STC 2008

The European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) Special Topic Conference (STC) is now taking place (9th-11th of September) at the British Computer Society buildings in Covent Garden, London, UK. Threre are about 50 participants coming from South- Africa, Cuba, and various European counties. The conference website is http://www.chirad.info/efmi_stc

Ubiquitous Knowledge Discovery

KDubiq is a EU funded Coordination Action (CA) in the FP7 Information Society and Technology program. The project period is from December 2005 to May 2008. More than 70 European companies, research and public sector institutions
are active KDubiq institutions. The main objectives are described as a joint Deliverable - a Blueprint on Ubiquitous Knowledge Discovery Systems - including relevant research topics and applications in this new research area. The KDubiq Blueprint gives the state-of-art on relevant research related to application requirements and technologies necessary for designing an information intensive system in ubiquitous environments.
A Summer School for Knowledge Discovery for Ubiquitous Computing with the objective to establish a common ground for the integration of the involved fields and to support the formation of a new community was recently held in Portugal as part of the KDUbiq CA.

Ubiquitous IT Europe conference report

The conference takes place in the old Bundestag buildings in Bonn, and has attracted 150 participants, 66% from Europe, 33% from Asia, and 1% from Australia. Among the audience are business rep's, researchers and politicians. uKorea and Korean companies as Samsung have had presentations. Among research challenges presented are; data processing, context-based adaptation, self-organizing networks and protocols, energy-aware systems and protocols, cross-layer optimization issues, security and privacy and human computer interface.
Peter Murray also have written about this event at http://differance-engine.net/krew/

Biomedical Wireless Sensor Network

The video shows a showcase demonstration of the IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN compliant sensor communication platform implementation for invasive blood pressure, ECG, pericardial accelerometer and a digital intrapleural drainage sytem applied during beating heart surgery. The showcase marked the end of the BWSN project involving 9 Scandinavian partners. From Sweden: Acreo, Ericsson R&D, Imego, Novosense and Millicore. From Finland: VTT.From Norway; MemsCap, The Interventional Centre and Novelda. The surgery was performed at the Interventional Centre at Rikshospitalet in Oslo, Norway

First Ubiquitous IT Europe Forum

The first European conference dedicated to uHealth is coming up in Bonn, Germany. Among organizers are University of Bonn, Fraunhofer IAIS, the Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, u-Korea Forum and Korea u-City Association. Find more information on the conference website:
The Ubiquitous IT Europe Forum organizes, in conjunction with the University of Bonn and Aving Global News Network, a series of conferences on the topic of ubiquitous computing.
The first event in this series takes place in Bonn, Germany between March 10th and 12th, 2008. The main objective is to bring together the Asian and European communities that actively work on ubiquitous technologies to foster the exchange of experiences and encourage future global collaborations. The conference will be held at the World Congress Center in Bonn, which is the former federal government Plenary Chamber.
Attendance is free, and the conference program has 16 sessions addressing uCity Technologies, European Projects, uApplications. In addition Keynotes and Panel Discussions are scheduled.

Digital plaster for personalized healthcare

An Ultra Low Power Intelligent Sensor Interface and Transceiver Platform has been developed by Toumaz. The BAN platform has a variety of sensors embedded in a plaster facilitating a wireless infrastructure
for intelligent, non-intrusive continuous monitoring,
to deliver a new wave
of lifestyle-compatible, personalised care applications – with
the potential to transform the treatment and management
of chronic diseases for millions of people.

By providing the complete infrastructure for an end-to-end telemedicine
system, this new integrated platform has the potential to revolutionise
the architecture of healthcare information systems, providing a unique
platform for analysis and decision-making based on real-time data.

Google Earth for the body

IBM has published this interesting application in their pressroom. This type of application with a graphical representation of the patients' body migt turn out as a very useful interface to EPR's not only for physicans. Especially interesting would be to give patients access to their own avatar and use this system in a Personal Health Record application.

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND 26 Sep 2007: IBM researchers today unveiled a prototype visualization software that allows doctors to interact with medical data the same way they interact with their patients: by looking at the human body.
Created at IBM's Zurich Research Lab, the technology uses an avatar -- a 3D representation of the human body -- to allow doctors to visualize patient medical records in an entirely new way. Called the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME), this innovative visualization method allows a doctor to click with the computer mouse on a particular part of the avatar "body" to trigger a search of
medical records to retrieve relevant information.
"It's like Google Earth for the body," said IBM Researcher Andre Elisseeff, who leads the healthcare projects at IBM's Zurich lab. "In hopes of speeding the move toward electronic healthcare records, we've tried to make information easily accessible for healthcare providers by combining medical data with visual representation, making it as simple as possible to interact with data that can improve patient care."