Free Seminar: eHealth, and the Austrian Institute of Technology

Seminar at Canberra Research Laboratory, by Karl Kreiner

Wed, Dec 15, 2pm NICTA seminar room (ground floor) map
Dr. Karl Kreiner

The seminar will outline work that is being undertaking by the Austrian Institute of Technology, in relation to eHealth, and Dr. Kreiner’s work both here in Australia and in Austria, in particular recent work presented at the Global Telehealth Conference in Perth.

Dr. Kreiner is currently based in Canberra, the talk will run for 20 minutes.

All welcome

In the news: Canberra Times

On Sunday, following our appearance at NICTA-Canberra Tech-Net, the Canberra Times ran an article on the swimming study we are currently undertaking. Thanks to Frances Stewart for the great story!

Your laps could help Australia's Olympic swimmers

We are currently looking for volunteers who would like to swim, to test new technology developed between NICTA and the Australian Institute of Sport.

The devices are worn by swimmers, and can tell all the major aspects of what the swimmer is doing.

More information is available from the registration page.

ABC local radio also ran an interview on the call for volunteers.

3 five-year trends for health data (from Health Care Blog)

Health care blog has released the most likely (top 3) trends in health care data for the next five years

1. Structured Health Data (XML) - everything will be stored.
2. Point-to-point sharing of health data - so health data networks will interconnect
3. Apps/middle-ware - less browsing more aggregating.

Have a look at the full Health Care Blog for more info

Telehealth announcement

The Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced $392million in funds for telehealth, the majority ($250m) of which will provide Medicare rebates for online consultation. This was a major barrier to tele-health uptake in Australia, and now may be summarily removed.

More details follow below:

Australian Federal Budget, e-health announcements

Two new ehealth initiatives have been announced as part of the Australian Federal budget. Combined they represent a move toward more detailed (smarter?) health and medicine monitoring.

eHealth — personally controlled electronic health records [AUD$466.7m]

"Australians will be able to check their medical history online through the introduction of personally controlled electronic health records, which will boost patient safety, improve health care delivery, and cut waste and duplication."

more info from the Department of Health and Aging.

Fifth Community Pharmacy Agreement [AUD$15.4b]

"The measure will also provide funding of $375.3 million over six years (including $91.8 million in 2014‑15) to implement new initiatives under the agreement. These include:

• a range of new patient‑focused pharmacy programs including patient medication monitoring (at a cost of $285.5 million);
• a 15 cent payment to pharmacists for every prescription processed electronically with a National E‑Health Transition Authority specifications (at a cost of $82.6 million); and
• collection of data on pharmaceuticals that are priced below the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme general co‑payment (currently $33.30) including patient, prescriber and dispenser demographic data (at a cost of $7.2 million)."

more from the budget papers (paper 2)

re-post: Nurses say technology can cut lost time

From the E-Health Insider

Finding missing equipment and misplaced patient records is costing the NHS an estimated £1 billion a year in wasted nurses' time. Better use of tracking technologies and electronic records have been identified by nurses as having the potential to cut waste and improve patient safety.

The UK’s 400,000 secondary care nurses are spending almost four hours each week searching for medication, patient records and medical devices according to the survey by GS1 UK, in conjunction with the Nursing Standard.

• A quarter of the 861 hospital nurses surveyed said that patient records and lab results go missing at least once a day.
• Nearly a third (31%) believed that the use of physical patient records, instead of electronic systems, are responsible for causing problems with patient care.
• Nurses said better use of tracking technology could help reduce patient safety incidents – 44% of nurses felt that bar-coded wristbands would reduce patient safety incidents by over 50%.

more

Find us at CeBit Australia

The Human Performance Improvement project will be presenting new work at CeBit Australia in Sydney in May 23-25. We'll be showing off some of out patented technologies and our latest sports algorithms. We look forward to seeing you there.

More from the NICTA events site.

Public hardware design for collecting data now online

The hardware design has been used in a number of measurement campaigns to evaluate performance of body-area-networks on and around the human body.

Details of the set-up and the PCB layout are available from the NICTA project page. We expect that as the standardization process moves forward, there will be a need to also standardize the measurement and modeling approaches used. Public hardware and data sets are an important part of this process.

Update on the IEEE Body-Area-Networks standard

The Body-Area-Network standard IEEE 802.15.6 has moved a step closer to completion. The four draft documents have now combined into a single draft standard. This draft will be discussed at the upcoming meeting in May.

Public data set for radio modeling around the human body released

We have just released our first dataset, of real radio measurements on a human subject, whilst they undertook everyday activities. The details include office work, driving home, cooking and watching television. 

The dataset is available from the HPI project website

Eric Topol: The wireless future of medicine

Eric Topol says we'll soon use our smartphones to monitor our vital signs and chronic conditions. At TEDMED, he highlights several of the most important wireless devices in medicine's future -- all helping to keep more of us out of hospital beds.

Much of the new data is likely to be streamed via wireless networks to and from smart phones, from small sensors in and around the human body. See the TED talk for more info.

Tech Predictions for 2010 from The Australian

As part of the tech report for 2010, The Australian newspaper asked a select team of CTO's and CEO's what their major predictions for 2010 were.

Some highlights:

• David Skellern NICTA: Fuel-efficient cars and the appliance of science in sport will be the focus this year.
• Malcolm Thatcher, Mater Health Services: There is great potential for health IT to transform healthcare delivery, E-health can be a big enabler of healthcare efficiencies and transformation of quality and safety -- getting a bigger bang for the buck.
• Tracey Fellows Microsoft Australia: Government investment in broadband is putting technology on the agenda, where it hasn't been, at that level, for a long time. That's creating a bigger buzz about the industry all up, which is good for all of us.

Bumblebee - a new micropower Body-Area-Network?

From the University of Washington: 

A team from Professor Brian Otis' Wireless Sensing Lab has been named a winner at the 2010 Design Automation Conference (DAC)/International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Design Competition. Their entry, titled "The Bumblebee: A 0.3 gram, 560uW, 0.1cm3 Wireless Biosignal Interface with 10-m Range", was authored by Tim Morrison, Helen Zhang, Shailesh Rai, Jagdish Pandey, Jeremy Holleman, and Brian Otis.

More info from the University of Washington's website

Australian Communications Theory Workshop

We'll be presenting several posters at the Australian Communications Theory Workshop in Canberra over the next few days -- Wed to Fri. If you're at the Australian National University, then feel free to drop by and visit.

In particular, we've got work on (links are to those posters that have associated papers):

• Channel characterisation and prediction (wed)
• Sparsity enhancing windows (thurs)
• Body Area Networks: Lessons learnt (thurs)
• Body Area Network transmission power control (fri)

You can find more publications here

Welcomes and farewells

The last few weeks have seen a quite a lot of staff movement within the HPI group. We said farewell to the six summer scholars, who handed in their final reports Friday, 29-Jan. Farewell also to Dr. Jian (Andrew) Zhang - who has taken up a tenure track position at the CSIRO lab in Marsfield Sydney.

We welcome two new staff to the machine learning track of HPI: Mr. William Han, research programmer and Dr. Hanna Suominen, post-doctoral researcher, both join the algorithm development team.

Sleeping detrimental to Body-Area-Networks

After several nights' work, we now have a detailed modelling of the impact of sleeping on the links of a body area network.

The initial results are in Further sleeping measurements for BAN

300+ hours of sleeping BAN channel measurements with characterisation of data in terms of outages with respect to receiver sensitivity. Showing that channel outages are greater than 10% with -100 dBm receiver sensitivity. A new appendix was added to document that responds to some concerns about the measurements that were raised at the November 2009 meeting. These measurements validate the measurements presented in November.