European Commission Information Society & Media DG
Contact with SAPHIRE
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| State of the art: Saphire in the world |
The SAPHIRE project mainly utilizes various current state-of-the-art technologies. Wireless medical sensor devices is one of them; by which it is possible to obtain measurements of heart rate, oxygen saturation, end-tidal CO2, and serum chemistries, including serum glucose, with small, non-invasive sensors.
Companies such as Nonin (http://www.nonin.com/Products/products.html) and Numed (http://www.numed.on.ca/home.htm) have developed wireless vital sign sensors based on Bluetooth technology, while Radianse (http://www.radianse.com/) has developed an RF-based location-tracking system.
Another important technology which is crucial for the SAPHIRE System is the Web Service. Web Services have been described as the third phase of the Internet. In the first phase communications over the Internet were mainly through static content. In the second phase there was a degree of dynamic content creation. In the third, Web services phase, Internet is becoming a global common platform where organizations and individuals communicate among each other to carry out various commercial activities and to provide value-added services. The dynamic enterprise and dynamic value chains become achievable and even mandatory for competitive advantage.
Currently, describing the semantic of Web in general, and semantic of Web services in particular are very active research areas. World Wide Web Consortium has started the initiative to develop Semantic Web and a semantic markup language for publishing and sharing ontologies, namely Web Ontology Language (OWL), is being developed for this purpose. OWL is derived from DAML+OIL (http://www.w3.org/2001/10/ daml+oil) by incorporating learnings from the design and application use of DAML+OIL. It builds upon the Resource Description Framework (http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-schema, http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax).
When healthcare information is transferred between two different Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) systems, it is essential that the clinical meaning expressed by the original author within a set of record entries is faithfully preserved and presented by the receiving system, even though this may have internal system architecture different from that of the sending system.
A number of EHR standards and frameworks have been developed to assist with the interoperability and integration of distributed EHR information. Ideally, all EHR systems would adopt common and systematized hierarchies of component names, use multi-lingual clinical coding systems with perfect cross-mappings and use identical reference models for measurements.
However, this has not been realized yet. Not only do a number of international health information standards exist, such as CEN ENV 13606, HL7 and GEHR, but each country, state, division, hospital and vendor usually has their own “standard clinical data model”. Therefore the SAPHIRE Project is adopting the semantically enriched Web service approach to provide the interoperability of sensor systems and medical information systems.
Another state of the art topic is the agent technology which is also mandatory for SAPHIRE Project. An agent is a software entity that can perform information-related tasks without ongoing human supervision. In the recent years, agent technology has found many interesting applications in decision support systems and internet applications.
As the benefits of using agents in such applications become clear, numerous agent development platforms have emerged with various degrees of abstraction and completeness ranging from bare-bones API's to full-fledged but less flexible building packages.
These frameworks all have their strong points and lacking features, the most important factors being compliance to a specification (e.g. FIPA), support for the mobility of the agents from host to host, support for lightweight agents, support for advanced planning-scheduling and combinations thereof. An Inference Engine is a software tool that emulates the human capability to arrive at a conclusion by reasoning and complements agent software.
Due to the progress of the Information Society during the last couple of years the ability to easily gather and monitor personal data has improved dramatically. Several directives, recommendations, laws, and standards concerning these topics have been published at European level in recent years. These documents have in common that they are related to the protection of personal data against processing and that they formulate conditions and rules under which the processing is allowed and how processing may be carried out.
On the technological side, developing security and privacy mechanisms for sensor networks is still an active research area. Since sensor devices have limited computational and communications resources, it becomes impractical to use currently available security algorithms, since they were designed for powerful processors. Security and privacy mechanisms designed specifically for sensor data and network protocols are needed.
Alternative cryptographic primitives and the security protocols in the sensor networks should be adapted. Security in sensor networks is mainly avoiding adversaries read and tamper sensor data. Basic wireless communication is also not secure. Because it is broadcast, any adversary can eavesdrop on traffic, inject new messages, and replay old messages. Hence, it is not possible to rely on trust assumptions on the communication infrastructure of wireless sensor networks.
On the other hand, Security and Privacy standards for Web Services are now emerging based on the WS-Security roadmap (http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-secroad/).
The key industry leaders such as IBM and Microsoft established a family of security specifications for web services. These specifications are designed to work together to provide a comprehensive and extensible web services security infrastructure.
In addition to all, there are some wireless medical sensor based projects on the market which are;
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Intel (http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20040316corp.htm ) is investing in research and development of sensor networks, recognizing this technology as crucial to addressing the pending global age wave and public health crises. For this purpose, on March 16, 2004, Intel Corporation gave US government officials a first-hand look at future in-home healthcare applications at a technology demonstration hosted today by the Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST). |
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Motorola and Partners Telemedicine, a service of Harvard Teaching Hospitals, on the 28th of September 2004, announced a collaboration to test MOTOHEALTH, a Motorola solution that uses mobile phones to help healthcare providers monitor chronically ill patients as they go about their normal daily routines.
http://www.motorola.com/mediacenter/news/detail
/0,,4723_4023_23,00.html)
It is stated that when MOTOHEALTH solution is implemented into a comprehensive healthcare program, can give healthcare providers useful, daily updates on a patient’s physiological levels such as blood pressure, glucose level, and weight. It is indicated that this will facilitate proactive treatment action, resulting in fewer hospitalizations and visits to emergency rooms, potentially lowering healthcare costs. |
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CodeBlue Project (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/vitaldust/) is exploring applications of wireless sensor network technology to pre-hospital and in-hospital emergency care . It is designed to provide routing, naming, discovery, and security for wireless medical sensors, PDAs, PCs, and other devices that may be used to monitor and treat patients in a range of medical settings. CodeBlue scales across a wide range of network densities, ranging from sparse clinic and hospital deployments to very dense, ad hoc deployments at a mass casualty site. |
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The US Military Operational Medicine Research Program , under its War Fighter Physiologic Status Monitoring – Initial Capability (WPSM-IC) program is developing what is essentially a wellness monitor for each soldier. This system is comprised of a medical hub which hosts a personal area network of physiologic and wireless medical sensors and a number of algorithms. The algorithms estimate the state of the war fighter in the following areas: Thermal , Hydration , Cognitive , Life Signs , and Wound Detection. |
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CareMedia Project at Carnegie Mellon University http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/caremedia/) uses computer vision techniques to track the progress of patients and staff at a skilled nursing facility for patients with advanced dementia. The shortage of geriatric care professionals, the growth of the elderly population, and the societal benefits of improving quality of life and care in skilled nursing facilities underscore the need for CareMedia: automated video and sensor analysis for geriatric care. |
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Project Nightingale ( http://www.supercomputingonline.com/print.php?sid=6748) at the University of Sydney, Australia, is aiming to develop a context-aware data management system across a suite of personal computing devices with an applied focus on applications that stimulate intellectual and social fitness in the elderly. The project's goal is to substitute the classic desktop interface with invisible and ambient interfaces that let individuals or groups engage in reminiscence-oriented group activities. |
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The Smart Medical Home Research Laboratory ( http://www.futurehealth.rochester.edu/ smart_home/) at the University of Rochester , USA , is aiming to develop an integrated Personal Health System, so all technologies are integrated and work seamlessly. This technology will allow consumers, in the privacy of their own homes, to maintain health, detect the onset of disease, and manage disease. The data collected 24/7 inside the home will augment the data collected by healthcare professionals and hospitals. The data collection modules in the home will start with the measurement of traditional vital signs (blood pressure, pulse, respiration). |
There are also some other IST Projects which are in the European region and have similar field with SAPHIRE Project;
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MyHeart (IST 507816, http://www.extra.research.philips.com/euprojects/myheart/), is an Integrated Project, funded by the IST programme. MyHeart aims fighting cardio-vascular diseases (CVD) by preventive lifestyle and early diagnosis. Its objective is to develop “functional clothes” together with integrated electronics which are considered as intelligent clothes. Intelligent clothes will contain novel sensors and electronics with intelligent algorithms that are integrated into the garments, allowing monitoring and evaluating the health status of a person and reacting on it. |
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The MobiHealth (IST-2001-36006, http://www.mobihealth.org/) provides a Java service platform for mobile healthcare. It enables remote monitoring of patients using 2.5/3G public wireless infrastructures. The major components of the MobiHealth system are the Body Area Network, the Back-end system and the end-user system. Patient data is collected using a Body Area Network (BAN). A healthcare practitioner can view and analyze the patient data from a remote location. The back-end system is the software system that registers the incoming signals and makes them available for further processing. MobiHeath project has focused on the infrastructure of the sensor network. |
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AMON (IST-2000-25239, http://www.medictouch.net/AMON/index.htm) system is a wearable personal monitor medical device that evaluates human vital signs using advanced bio-sensors. The system gathers and analyzes the vital information and then transmits the data to a remote telemedicine centre, for further analysis and emergency care, using cellular infrastructure. AMON-WMD utilizes built-in medical algorithms for routine primary evaluation. |
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The main objective of HEARTS (IST-2001-37403, http://heartsproject.datamat.it/hearts) project is to develop techniques for early detection of myocardial ischaemia from the ECG signals. The system has a decision support module which analyses data using neural network processing technology. It obtains anytime information about health status related to the specific subject and the specific context. |
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The ARTEMIS project is currently developing a semantic Web services based interoperability framework for the healthcare domain. |
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The aim of U-R-SAFE (IST-2001-33352, http://ursafe.tesa.prd.fr/) project is to have the elderly person wear medical measuring devices, all connected via short range Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) to a central, portable electronic unit, the Personal Base Station. |
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Mobi-Dev project aims to allow clinical staff with portable devices (based on palm PCs) to wirelessly connect to different information databases, able to perform real time data management. The project uses the smart card technology to permit electronic signing of input data with legal validity all over Europe; Bluetooth connection to permit the use of Mobi-Dev inside the hospitals; GPRS/UMTS connection to permit the use of the system for transmitting large amounts of data and natural language understanding to allow the users to enter data into structured databases, simply speaking to the palm PC. In fact, Mobi-Dev project is using a palm PC to access the data in a Hospital Information System (HIS). Sensors and data coming from sensors are out of the scope of the project. |
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The main objective of the CASCOM project is to implement, validate, and trial a value-added supportive infrastructure for Semantic Web based business application services across mobile and fixed networks. The primary field of validation of the project work is the telemedicine domain and the on-the-fly coordination of pervasive healthcare services. |
Saphire project will built upon these state of the are technologies and research projects and provide an intelligent healthcare monitoring platform based on semantically enriched clinical guidelines, which has not been achieved yet.
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