Rural and Remote Tele-Health

We'll be in Cairns Sunday through Tuesday, presenting at the HISA Rural and Remote Telehealth conference. Presentation topic? What does it mean to include cloud in telehealth. This is based on recent work NICTA carried out for the Northern Territory Department of Health and Families. It's also the first time I'm using Prezi... if the presentation survives, we'll post a link after the show.

May 30: Here is the presentation.
May 30: The Health Informatics Society of Australia is live-blogging the workshop. Have a look

Visiting radio host

We had a visitor earlier in the week: Rod Taylor, of Fuzzy Logic 2XX and "Ask Fuzzy" from the Canberra Times, came to visit the NICTA Canberra lab on Tuesday. Rod saw a few of the projects around the lab, including

• our foosball playing robot setup: a robot that plays against mortals (not well yet, but that's the point... it's an ongoing summer scholar project)
• Some of our toys, like the nifty wireless gloves
• Mark Reed and the Interferex lab: building wireless interference cancelling systems to extend the range of your phone
• The Bionic Vision clinical test lab: where NICTA researchers place volunteers in a specially designed maze to test out depth-of-field algorithms
• Automap: a team that delivers automatic sign recognition for GPS-map devices
• Opinion Watch: extracting meaningful information from the blogosphere.

Rod also took some photos: you can see them on the Fuzzy Logic blog, in gallery 1 and gallery 2.

Ripple: the personal media revolution for health

The Joneses: masters of
ripple [wikipedia]

Health IT is awash with predictions of the "next big thing" being one of any number of ICT-inspired leaps forward.


Some recent predictions from Vector blog seem quite likely to occur in the near future.  As Keeley Wray wrote in Vector blog, Advanced computing + healthcare = disruptive change.  "...healthcare has been a dinosaur when it comes to using advanced computational approaches.  But I think in the near future we will see measurable change." 


In Keeley's post, the big trends are visualisation, patient empowerment through open data, and knowledge engines providing the "smarts".

Whilst it is likely that any of the predicted trends for health + IT will be "disruptive" the biggest change will come through the impact that all these trends have by occurring simultaneously. Think perfect storm. We'll look into this after the jump.

EU-Australian e-Health workshop at the ICT proposer's day Budapest

We are finalizing details for a May 17-20 European-Australian e-Health workshop in Budapest. This workshop is sponsored by NICTA, the Australian e-Health Technology Cluster and the Department of Innovation Industry Science and Research. Delegates from Australia are from several research Institutes, including Melbourne University, University of Western Sydney, University of Southern Queensland, CSIRO and NICTA.

The workshop will be held at the Le Meridien Hotel, Budapest on May 17-18, with connection to the EU ICT Proposer's Day (May 19-20).

For more information please contact and registration:
Leif Hanlen
+61 4 6677 6469,
leif.hanlen.nicta.com.au

Pusing Human Performance

This week in radio: Fuzzy Logic 2XX FM's Rod Taylor interviewed Leif Hanlen, on how NICTA is "pushing human performance"

You can listen online: http://fuzzylogicon2xx.podbean.com

What does it take to win an olympic gold medal? Humans are pushing the limits of performance. The difference between a gold and a tin medal can be a tiny percent. In today's ultra competetive events you need every ounce, and the ability to closely monitor an athelete during training can be key.

Dr Leif Hanlen is a senior researcher at Australia's IT research body NICTA where they are building devices for real-time evaluation of atheletes. But it's not just about elite sport stars because anybody who wants their health closely monitored will be interested. Then, what do you do with the data? This can be mined for insights into the individual or the population.

Leif interviewed by Rod, Arwen and Michael, who also brought his own beautiful music into this show.