Health Information Systems

Against the background of demographic change, the working group Health Information Systems develops personal health systems and intelligent assistants for the elderly and chronically ill persons. Its homecare and telemedicine platform TOPCARE was used in many telemedicine pilots in Europe and America. Our R&D efforts are focussed on solutions for personalized and preventive medicine such as predictive health assessment systems. In addition to this, the working group realizes the vision of intelligent, ad hoc networking, plug and play-enabled medical devices and sensors, for which it provides the middleware framework Semantic Medical Device Space for semantic interoperability and for self-learning.

The working group develops the electronic infrastructure and respective tools for the networked clinical research. Examples are its GRID-enabled, ontology-based management system for multicenter clinical trials ObTIMa, which facilitates the integration of study data, or eurocryoDB, an innovative sample logistics system for biobanks.

In the working group, we have developed an SOA-based middleware infrastructure using Semantic Web and Semantic Web Service (SWS) technologies, known as Semantic Medical Devices Space (SMDS), which is being used to develop the next generation of Ambient Intelligent (AmI) medical devices/sensors, having the capabilities to semantically discover the desired medical devices/sensors based on their physical and/or functional characteristics, and use their service(s) for exchanging the measurement results and producing a higher level of interpretation of these results. SMDS is enriched with our own developed Semantic Medical Devices Discovery Protocol (SMDDP) and an integrated micro OWL Description Logic (DL) Reasoning System (µOR), which provides semantic discovery, knowledge querying, knowledge consistency checking and inference capabilities on each AmI medical device/sensor.