The vision of the project is to develop a platform that enables coordination and communication between the different actors on the acute area such as hospitals, ambulances and AMK (Akutmedicinsk koordinering). The AkutFlow platform will increase the overview and the quality of visitation and improve the flow across different organizational silos. It is furthermore a goal that the platform should be open to external systems and support national and international standards on the acute area. The goal of the project is to develop a first version of the platform and develop a number of prototypes that run on top of the AkutFlow platform.

The AkutFlow project is funded by The Central Denmark Region and EU via Caretech Innovation.

The Central Denmark Region and EU have granted DKK 37.5 million to a 4-year IT effort within pervasive healthcare, ensuring the shortest way between research, implementation and business.

Caretech Innovation will initiate a number of new projects, the aim of which is to create innovative IT solutions in the healthcare sector in the region as well as in the rest of the country and abroad. All projects will have a clear commercial perspective as well as a high international research level. Furthermore, focus in on user-driven innovation.

Caretech Innovation is operated by the Alexandra Institute and is embedded in the Center for Pervasive Healthcare. The chairman of the board is Erik Stridbæk, former Director, CTO & VP , and the day-to-day management consists of Director, Morten Kyng, Professor at the Dept. of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Deputy Director Margit Kristensen, Head of Research and Innovation (Pervasive Healthcare), the Alexandra Institute.

For more information on Caretech Innovation, please contact us at kontakt@caretechinnovation.dk or see www.caretechinnovation.dk

The project started January 1st, 2010 and for the next four years it is meant to identify and develop open technical standards with a primary focus on ICT-based solutions targeted for the home and workplace. This applies, at first, to the sensors, robots, handheld devices and other wireless technologies developed as part of the overall development of welfare technologies for chronic patients.

Current telemedicine related projects within the social and health professional area develop their own ad-hoc infrastructure solutions. They do this; because there are no widely adopted solutions for, e.g. connectivity, identification and login, secure communications, automatic switching between networks, data formats and the integration with various electronic records.

The project aims to change this by providing a basis for an open technical infrastructure that will support the development of secure, scalable ICT-based social and health services. An infrastructure that is an extension of and complement to existing infrastructures and standards, e.g. Sundhedsdatanettet, the National Service Platform and the national programme for telemedicine and home monitoring.

The project's primary target group is companies developing communicative systems and products for chronic patients. The project will generate recommendations and standards providing a technical basis that allow ICT-based health and social products to communicate with each other and with other ICT solutions in the home, in hospitals, with GPs, etc.

The long-term objective of the project is a national wide infrastructure and given the project's recommendations and standards such national infrastructure, that is, the crosscutting infrastructural solutions, could be developed. The actors responsible for this development thus constitute the project's secondary audience. These solutions are to be made available to the individual telemedicine projects and thus dramatically reduce both the complexity as development costs for individual product.

Connect2Care is a cross-cutting project, which is part of and working with four pilot projects under the UNIK Consortium (Use of New Technology in Innovative Solutions for Chronic Patients). The UNIK consortium is granted by the Council for Technology and Innovation as a result on a tender on Innovative Social Solutions in Strategic Partnerships. The pilot projects have focused on four chronic diseases: heart patients, diabetics, COPD patients and patients with muscular skeletal disorders.

In the Flex-control project the participants want to describe requirements and recommendations for an open, scalable and modular platform that can be used in health-related projects and as part of the intelligent home. This will be done through user studies and other user involvement and intensive literature studies.

There is a great research challenge in defining such a platform and the platform should be built on open standards to maximize flexibility in relation to future providers of services. The hope is, that these requirements and recommendations will feed into a national initiative within telemedicine solutions – currently we only see some bud-shooting in the area.

A future goal in the project will be to enable small and medium enterprises to offer services without having to worry about the underlying platform, but just think of how they can offer/develop the best service using the underlying platform.

The Flex-control project is funded by The Central Denmark Region and EU via Caretech Innovation.

The project is concerned with the development of better aids for the handicapped - and handicapped themselves are playing major roles in the project, including that of innovators. The project is organized in six 'work packages':

Sølund. In this work package we work together with The Village Sølund, a residence for mentally handicapped. Methodically one of the main challenges is how to involve the handicapped in the design work. Technically we are investigating 'interactive room technology' as part of the therapy.

Egmont. Egmont is a high school for physically handicapped young people and in this work package we are developing a course on user driven innovation/participatory design for physically handicapped and their helpers. The last part of each occurrence of the course will consist of a set of small design projects carried out in cooperation between students from Egmont and from a nearby school of engineering.

Better use. In this work package we are analyzing a number of aids which considered in isolation seem to work well, but which nevertheless often fail in practice. We are currently experimenting with better interactive instruction material and making the dependencies on context more explicit.

User communities. In this work package we are setting up a small number of user communities where we turn the standard user communities 180 degrees. Thus each of the communities is organized around a certain type of handicap and controlled by the participants who then invite companies to join and learn about potentials for new aids and improvements of existing ones.

Theory development. Participants from the four work packages listed above work together on developing theories on user driven innovation, IT infrastructure and pervasive computing based on the experiences gained in the practical experiments carried out. In addition the work package will develop proposals for new or modified design techniques, it infrastructure, software architecture and interaction styles.

Project management. The last work package is project management.

Project website (in Danish): www.handivision.dk

The vision of the Health Barometer project is to develop a technological tool that makes it easier for the user to decide on the many single, concrete choices that we make in our everyday life. This will be done by clarifying relations between lifestyle and health.

The tools is called a barometer because it can – based on current user lifestyle patterns - give an estimate of the user’s state of health and of how this state of health is influenced positively or negatively by the single choices.

In addition, this opens possibilities for elements of game and play, where the user e.g. can perform “What if...” experiments in order to increase the user’s knowledge about consequences of different choices. It also opens a possibility for the unit to integrate with social networks where several users together can inspire, discuss and compete on lifestyle and thereby help ensure a longer lasting effort.

The Health Barometer project is funded by The Central Denmark Region and EU via Caretech Innovation.

User-driven innovation should be an integrated part of the work in companies, organizations and institutions. This is the vision of the project “Sund Innovation i Randers Sundhedscenter” (Healthcare Innovation in Randers Health Center), in which companies from both the private and the public sector cooperate in developing ideas for products and services related to diabetes.

The project is promotion of trade in the sense that companies and public institutions are given new methods to work with participation of users in the development. More specifically, the companies work together on conducting a series of tests of different user-driven innovation (UDI) methods.

The point of origin for the experiments is taken in the Randers Health Center and the activities related to diabetes offered from the centre. The hypothesis is that this problem area contains possibilities for business and service developments via the user driven methods. The partners of the project are to use UDI methods for identifying and investigating challenges and to develop solutions that may increase the users experience of security, autonomy and a better life.

These fundamental needs create the foundation for – not just incremental ideas qualifying existing products – but also new radical ideas leading to development of new types of products.

Project website (in Danish): www.sundinnovation.com

Over an 18 month period, the HemoLab@Home project plans to design and develop a framework for a telemedicine application based on a medical device measuring parameters for haematological diseases monitoring. The framework includes technical as well as organisational components. Specifically for the technical component the framework investigates a human computer interface, a data transmission interface and an integration interface to integrate with the hospital computer systems; and for the organisational component, interaction between patients and the device, communication between the patient and the physician and interaction between the physician, the hospital system and the information provided by the medical device. The organisational and technical parts of the framework are closely interconnected and participatory design will be central in solving the research challenges of the project.

The HemoLab@Home project is funded by The Central Denmark Region and EU via Caretech Innovation.

MIKAT is about mobile and instrumental cognitive behavioral therapy. The goal of the project is to develop a tool that enables people with anxiety-related problems to act differently. It should be a tool that can be used anywhere independent of the situation. Based on a body-sensors we wish to enable to patient to be aware of his or her situation and thereby enable the patient to control his or her panic attack using techniques based on cognitive behavioral therapy.

The MIKAT project is funded by The Central Denmark Region and EU via Caretech Innovation.

The Remote Rehabilitation Support (RRS) project will develop an ICT solution that will lift preoperative patient education and information dissemination as well as postoperative support to a new level.

The concept is designed for patients who will undergo an accelerated course of diagnostic evaluation and treatment with support of the ICT solution. It will be tested on 37 patients, in a Randomized Clinical Trial (RCT), in connection with a total hip replacement (THA), where hospitalization time is cut down to one day. The RRS project will measure the physical outcome, quality of life, anxiety, complications and the influence the support person during the RCT.

Technologically we will work with strategies for patient interaction, such as the possibility for video telephony, interaction with EHR, patient-driven content and different types of sensor technologies. We will use information dissemination, information material in the form of movie clips, 3D animations, sounds, images and text.

In the literature, there are no previous examples of similar forms of pre-and postoperative psychological and physical support to patients and relatives, in connection with a course of treatment.

The RRS project is funded by The Central Denmark Region and EU via Caretech Innovation.

This project focuses on improving the quality of life for senior citizens by developing IT support for independent living in the home. This project is rooted in an innovation consortium including partners from academia, industry, public healthcare organizations, and senior citizen associations. Within the project, "home" is recognized broadly, including social networks of the seniors, relatives, as well as local authorities in residential area of the senior citizen. The idea is to focus on both individual needs in the homes and on possibilities involving the surrounding communities. A user-driven innovation process involving both senior citizens and healthcare providers will ensure that the needs and desires of the users will influence the development of health-related IT services. With respect to IT, we experiment with infrastructure, sensor systems and an open platform for independent services/applications. These issues are examined via development of a range of concrete "demonstrators", which are each based upon a specific problem. One demonstrator system provides tools for rehabilitation in the home of patients with chronic vestibular dysfunction (i.e., chronic dizziness). Another demonstrator project revolves around handling medical information in a personal health record that can integrate information from existing databases of the various health care providers, as well as health-related data from other sources, such as Web sites, medical instruments in the home (e.g., blood pressure monitors, or glucose monitors), and videos and photographs.

To read more (in Danish) about this project, you can read the article "Antropologerne kommer!" here

Project website (in Danish): www.bdsi.dk