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-than-sufficient 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