HEALTHINF 2014 Abstracts

Full Papers Short Papers
Full Papers
Paper Nr: 14
Title:

Cost-effective Design of Real-time Home Healthcare Telemonitoring
Authors:

Po-Chou Liang and Paul Krause
Abstract: The importance of telehealthcare for elderly and out-patients has been widely recognized. However, the adoption rate of home healthcare telemonitoring remains low due to limited evidence for cost-effectiveness. Our core objective of this work is the cost-effective design of a real-time home healthcare telemonitoring system based on mobile cloud computing. A second objective is to develop a simulation environment for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of a telemonitoring system and exploring technology choices. We are at an early stage, yet the results so far have been encouraging. Whilst we may not be able to deliver a complete solution, the methodological contribution of test environment plus simulation models will enable us to put the evaluation of telehealth solutions prior to moving to full-scale trials on a more scientific basis.
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Paper Nr: 21
Title:

An Ontological Map for Meaningful Use of Healthcare Information Systems (MUHIS)
Authors:

Arkalgud Ramaprasad, Thant Syn and Mohanraj Thirumalai
Abstract: An ontological map of meaningful use of healthcare information systems (MUHIS) is the visualization of its requirements and practices using an ontology. We map (a) the Stages 1and 2 meaningful use requirements set by the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services (CMS) for Electronic Health Records (EHR), and (b) the current literature on meaningful use, to derive the ontological map of the requirements and practices respectively. The map is fragmented and incomplete. The results will focus attention on the gaps (a) in the requirements, (b) in practices, and (c) between requirements and practices, and highlight the bright, light, blank, and blind spots in MUHIS. These gaps should be (a) bridged if they are important, (b) ignored if they are unimportant, or (c) reconsidered if they have been overlooked. Feedback based on incremental ontological maps over time will help to continuously improve MUHIS.
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Paper Nr: 25
Title:

Does Being Monitored during Sleep Affect People on a Cognitive and a Behavioral Level?
Authors:

M. S. Goelema, R. Haakma and P. Markopoulos
Abstract: Nowadays it is possible to monitor behavior or physiological features with specially-made devices that make self-monitoring an accessible and simple activity. Unknown is the effect these wearable devices may have on people’s lives and this also applies to the area of sleep monitoring devices. The aim of this preliminary study is to address the extent to which sleep monitoring devices affect people on a cognitive and behavioral level. Four participants aged from 34 to 60, filled out a sleep diary for three consecutive weeks and wore in the latter two weeks a sleep monitoring device. Adjustments on a cognitive and behavioral level were observed, but this was probably due to participating in this study and completing the sleep diary as was indicated by the participants. Since the market for self-monitoring devices is rapidly developing and more accessible for lay people, it is important to investigate the reactive outcomes of these devices as they may have consequences for people who have a high adherence to self-control. Moreover, the knowledge about self-monitoring will improve which will lead to better interventions carried out by, for example, sleep coaches.
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Paper Nr: 27
Title:

Rule-based Classification of Visual Field Defects
Authors:

Enkelejda Kasneci, Gjergji Kasneci, Ulrich Schiefer and Wolfgang Rosenstiel
Abstract: The automated recognition of the visual field defect type from results of visual field testing is crucial for the adequate diagnosis and treatment of the underlying disease of the visual system. This paper presents a reliable rule-based classifier that emulates the decision strategies of expert ophthalmologists based on a two-level approach that combines methods of unsupervised learning.
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Paper Nr: 38
Title:

Route2Health - A Novel Routing Service to Assist in Increasing Physical Activity
Authors:

Hassan A. Karimi and Monsak Socharoentum
Abstract: Walking is the simplest and most common mode of transportation and is widely recommended for a healthy lifestyle. However, other modes of transportation such as driving and riding are usually dominant when distances are too long to walk. Existing routing and direction services are designed to mainly serve common transportation requirements such as shortest distance, shortest travel time, minimum bus transfer, nearest bus stop, or closest parking lot. Existing services do not consider however, user’s preference for walking as the primary option, especially when multi-modal transportation is involved. This paper presents the concept of a new service called Route2Health where walking, due to its several benefits including health, is considered as the preferred mode of transportation. Route2Health, as a multi-modal transportation planning service, recommends either walking, if feasible, between pairs of origin and destination locations as the only mode of transportation or a combination of walking with other modes of transportation. Route2Health, if used frequently, is potential to help increase physical activity levels overtime. A prototype Route2Health is also discussed.
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Paper Nr: 47
Title:

Emotional Valence Detection based on a Novel Wavelet Feature Extraction Strategy using EEG Signals
Authors:

Hao Zhang, Shin'ichi Warisawa and Ichiro Yamada
Abstract: This paper presents a novel feature extraction strategy in the time-frequency domain using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for valence level detection using electroencephalography (EEG) signals. Signals from different EEG electrodes are considered independently for the first time in order to find an optimum combination through different levels of wavelet coefficients based on the genetic algorithm (GA). Thus, we take into consideration useful information obtained from different frequency bands of brain activity along the scalp in valence level detection, and we introduce a new set of features named the cross-level wavelet feature group (CLWF). The effectiveness of this approach is strongly supported by the analytical results of experiments in which EEG signals with valence level labels were collected from 50 healthy subjects. High accuracy was achieved for both 2-level (98%) and 3-level valence detection (90%) by applying leave-one-out cross validation using a probabilistic neural network (PNN). In addition, light-weighted sets with less than half EEG recording electrodes are proposed, which can achieve a high accuracy (86% for 3-level valence detection) with offering convenience of users and reducing computational complexity.
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Paper Nr: 48
Title:

Finger Motion Detection for Human Activities Recognition using Single sEMG Channel
Authors:

Yang Qian, Ichiro Yamada and Shin'ichi Warisawa
Abstract: Today’s aging population has recently become a significant problem, requiring a wearable health monitoring system for the elderly who are living alone. One of the focuses of this monitoring system is human activities recognition. We propose a wearable sensing method that is based on muscle’s crosstalk information that uses only one sEMG channel (a pair of electrodes) to recognize five basic finger motions (thumb flexion, index flexion, middle flexion, ring & little flexion, and rest position) related to daily human activities. In the first step, an inter-electrode distance (IED) experiment was conducted to define the suitable IED for crosstalk information collection. In this experiment’s recognition part, a conventional feature extraction method was adopted. The accuracy of each IED was compared and a suitable IED was defined (50 mm). In the second step, we propose two new features, the summit foot range (SFR) and summits number (SN), to represent the different patterns of finger motions’ sEMG signals and adopted the minimal Redundancy Maximal Relevance (mRMR) feature selection method to improve the accuracy. An accuracy of over 87% was achieved using the improved recognition methodology compared to 81.5% when using the conventional one.
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Paper Nr: 52
Title:

Feasibility Estimation for Clinical Trials
Authors:

Zhisheng Huang, Frank van Harmelen, Annette Ten Teije and Andre Dekker
Abstract: .
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Paper Nr: 54
Title:

CordiAAL: Enhanced Motivation for Cardiological Ergometer Training through Virtual Groups in Virtual Worlds
Authors:

Israfil Akman, Rafael Bielen, Henning Brümmer, Egor Kudrjaschow, Stefan Tschentscher, Oliver Dohndorf, Heiko Krumm, Jan-Dirk Hoffmann, Anke Workowski and Detlev Willemsen
Abstract: The project CordiAAL purposes the goal of developing a training system for patients with cardiovascular diseases. The first aim is to reduce the anxiety of overexertion by using a continuous monitoring of vital parameters and the second is to increase the patients' motivation according to a moderate physical activity by the virtual environment of the system. The training can be done alone or in common with several patients in a virtual group, regardless of the patients' location. When grouped together, the performance of the individual patient is aligned, so that patients with different fitness levels are able to work together. The evaluations revealed that the increase in motivation could be achieved by training in the virtual environment in virtual groups.
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Paper Nr: 57
Title:

Partopens at the Point of Care - Evaluating Digital Pen-based Maternal Labor Monitoring in Kenya
Authors:

Heather Underwood, John Ong’ech, Sara Rosenblum, Addie Crawley, S. Revi Sterling, John K. Bennett and Maya Appley
Abstract: The goal of the PartoPen system is to enhance the partograph, a paper-based labor monitoring tool intended to promote timely delivery of quality care by birth attendants in developing countries. The PartoPen digital pen hardware and software system supports partograph use by providing audio instructions for measuring and recording labor progress indicators, real-time decision support based on recorded measurements, and time-based patient-specific reminders for taking measurements. Earlier work found the PartoPen system effective in nursing classrooms at the University of Nairobi (UoN), Kenya where the PartoPen was used to support teaching and training of students in maternal labor monitoring procedures. This paper presents the results of several follow-on studies conducted in the maternity ward of Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) in Nairobi. Through these studies, we successively refine our understanding of the benefits of PartoPen use in this setting. We also identify and discuss the interrelated factors impacting PartoPen adoption and use in the labor ward at KNH, and review the challenges and opportunities likely to face digital pen deployments in other healthcare settings.
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Paper Nr: 64
Title:

Development of an Integrated Virtual Group Training System for COPD Patients
Authors:

Jonathan B. J. Dikken, Bert-Jan F. van Beijnum, Dennis H. W. Hofs, Mike P. L. Botman, Miriam M. Vollenbroek-Hutten and Hermie J. Hermens
Abstract: COPD patients experience a downward spiral of fear for breathlessness, inactivity and social isolation which leads to a bad physical condition. Motivation to keep patients compliant to their training scheme is a key factor in home-based exercise training. This paper presents the Integrated Training System for COPD patients; a home based virtual group exercise system to facilitate improvement of the exercise capacity safely at home using a virtual group environment. The four components of the system are the Home Trainer, the Virtual Exercise Environment, the Web Portal and the Controller. These components are implemented in a prototype. An in-training evaluation was performed to evaluate the subsystems used during a training exercise. All subsystems are working correctly during the evaluation. In this paper the focus for the Integrated Training System is on COPD patients, but the system might be used for other groups such as Chronic Heart Failure patients or elderly people in general.
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Paper Nr: 69
Title:

mDROID - An Affordable Android based mHealth System
Authors:

Anju Kansal, Avval Gupta, Kolin Paul and Sanjiva Prasad
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach towards the development of a portable, user-friendly and affordable mHealth System using Android based mobile devices. The Android application captures personal, biometric and medical data of a patient and combines them to generate an XML based medical record which is then uploaded to a server. The medical data are gathered from different sensors interfaced to an Arduino UNO board. The data are then converted into packets, which are transmitted on request to the mobile phone using Bluetooth. The XML report makes the mDROID system robust for query and inter-operability at the server end and also for merging with standardized XML based medical repositories. The mDROID system is designed for use by minimally trained health workers in the field.
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Paper Nr: 71
Title:

Activities Planning and Resource Assignment on Multi-place Hospital System - Exact and Approach Methods Adapted from the Bin Packing Problem
Authors:

Michel Gourgand, Nathalie Grangeon and Nathalie Klement
Abstract: In France, the Hospital Community of Territory (HCT) has been defined since the settlement of the pricing by activity (T2A) in 2004, and the new governance. This new community allows the pooling of the hospital resources between any places in the same territory. It aims at increasing the continuity of healthcare. A medical exam needs human resources and one material resource, both of them compatible with the exam. Human resources are supposed available all the time. In this paper, material resources are the critical resources. The objective is to create a decision support tool which plans the exams on each material resource. Some constraints have to be respected: compatibilities between exams and resources, resources opentime. We propose a mathematical model. It deals with an exams planning taking into account the assignment of material resources in the community over a given horizon planning. The problem is solved in an exact way and with approach methods applying bin packing heuristics and single solution based metaheuristics. Experimentation tackles with randomly generated instances.
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Paper Nr: 72
Title:

A System for Monitoring Stroke Patients in a Home Environment
Authors:

Bart Klaassen, Bert-Jan van Beijnum, Marcel Weusthof, Dennis Hofs, Fokke van Meulen, Henk Luinge, Federico Lorussi, Hermie Hermens and Peter Veltink
Abstract: Currently, the changes of functional capacity and performance of stroke patients after returning home from a rehabilitation hospital is unknown for a physician, having no objective information about the intensity and quality of a patient's daily-life activities. Therefore, there is a need to develop and validate an unobtrusive and modular system for objectively monitoring the stroke patient's upper and lower extremity motor function in daily-life activities and in home training. This is the main goal of the European FP7 project named “INTERACTION”. A complete sensing system is developed, whereby Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), Knitted Piezoresistive Fabric (KPF) goniometers, KPF strain sensors, EMG electrodes and force sensors are integrated into a modular sensor suit designed for stroke patients. In this paper, we describe the systems architecture. Data from the sensors are captured wirelessly and stored in a remote secure database for later access and processing via portal technology. In collaboration with clinicians and engineers, clinical outcome measures were defined and the question of how to present the data on the web portal was addressed. The first implementation of the complete system includes a basic version of all components and is currently being extended to include all sensors within the INTERACTION system.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 12
Title:

Using Ontology-based Registry and SPARQL Engine in Searching Patient’s Clinical Documents
Authors:

Juha Puustjärvi and Leena Puustjärvi
Abstract: As a patient may live in many places and use many healthcare specialities, patient’s clinical documents are often stored in several systems and locations. In order to alleviate this problem, an industry initiative IHE XDS allows health care documents to be shared over a wide area network, between hospitals, primary care providers, and social services. Its main innovation is the logical and physically separation of the indexing information used to retrieve documents from the actual content. Technically the XDS document registry is a subset of the ebXML Registry standard, and documents are exchanged using SOAP and HTTP, while SQL is used for information retrieval. Although IHE XDS has proven to be useful and workable innovation, we have investigated whether the technologies behind the IHE XDS could be replaced by new technologies such as by OWL-based registries and SPARQL engines. It turned out that these technologies enable the introducing simpler policies in document exchanges. For example, contrary to the IHE XDS, we do not have to expect patients’ records to follow then when they move from one affinity domain to another. Instead one SPARQL query processed by a SPARQL engine is able to composing the links to patient’s original clinical documents.
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Paper Nr: 13
Title:

Development of Assistive Technology - When Learning Disability is no Barrier
Authors:

Onintra Poobrasert and Waragorn Gestubtim
Abstract: Assistive technology does not cure a specific learning disability. These tools are allowing a student with learning disabilities to demonstrate their intelligence and knowledge. Assistive technology for the person with learning disabilities is a made-to-fit implementation. Trial and error may be required to find a set of appropriate tools and techniques for a specific individual. Therefore this paper is aimed to attest the use of assistive technology: Thai Spell Checker program which enhanced students with learning disabilities in their writing. This paper will also depict the details of the design and development of assistive technology tool, including information on the experiment with real users. The results from the study show that the assistive technology tool has a correct rate of 89% for detecting misspelling words. Additionally results indicate that the students have writing improvement in Thai language as 75%, 15%, 30%, 70%, and 35%.
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Paper Nr: 20
Title:

Toward Pay-As-You-Go Data Integration for Healthcare Simulations
Authors:

Philipp Baumgärtel, Gregor Endler and Richard Lenz
Abstract: ProHTA (Prospective Health Technology Assessment) aims at understanding the impact of innovative medical processes and technologies at an early stage. To that end, large scale healthcare simulations are employed to estimate the effects of potential innovations. Simulation techniques are also utilized to detect areas with a high potential for improving the supply chain of healthcare. The data needed for both validating and adjusting these simulations typically comes from various heterogeneous sources and is often preaggregated and insufficiently documented. Thus, new data management techniques are required to cope with these conditions. Because of the high initial integration effort, we propose a pay-as-you-go approach using RDF. Thereby, data storage is separated from semantic annotation. Our proposed system offers automatic initial integration of various data sources. Additionally, it provides methods for searching semantically annotated data and for loading it into the simulation. The user can add annotations to the data in order to enable semantic integration on demand. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of this approach with a prototype implementation. We discuss benefits and remaining challenges.
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Paper Nr: 23
Title:

A Mobile Augmentative and Alternative Communication (MAAC) Application for Disabilities
Authors:

Ka-Lun Cheung, Toby H. W. Lam and King-Hong Cheung
Abstract: Communication board is one of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) which provides a large amount of pictures classified under various categories. It is a useful instrument for disabled people, who are suffering from speech and language impairment, to facilitate their communication by simply selecting pictures. The traditional communication board would assist the users to communicate with the others. However, there are a number of limitations of the communication board such as large in size and difficult to carry. Because of the advanced technology, it is inexpensive to purchase a mobile device. In this paper, we present our mobile augmentative and alternative communication application, namely MAAC app, for disabled people. The MAAC app runs on the Android-based mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. This application is suitable for disabled people who are suffered from cerebral palsy, spasm and stroke. We performed user acceptance test (UAT) with domain experts on the application and the overall comment is positive.
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Paper Nr: 24
Title:

Web-based Support for Population-based Medical Research - Presenting the QuON Survey System
Authors:

F. A. Henskens, D. J. Paul, M. Wallis, J. Bryant, M. Carey, E. Fradgley, C. E. Koller, C. L. Paul, R. W. Sanson-Fisher and A. Zucca
Abstract: This paper discusses the needs of medical researchers working in the area of patient-centred medicine, in particular their use of survey data in measuring patient opinions, needs, perceived quality of care received, and priorities of health service interventions. Until quite recently, collection of survey data has been either paper-based, or achieved using computer software that largely duplicated paper-based processes with limited additional functionality. The authors investigate the use of web-based technology to support collection of such data from patients, including experiences and observations on enhanced/additional functionality made possible by its adoption. A novel software design termed QuON is presented, together with examples of its capabilities and uses in current research projects.
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Paper Nr: 30
Title:

A Decentralized Pseudonym Scheme for Cloud-based eHealth Systems
Authors:

Liangyu Xu and Armin B. Cremers
Abstract: A decentralized pseudonym scheme is proposed for providing storage, encryption and authentication of patients’ EHRs in cloud-based eHealth systems. The pseudonyms of a patient are generated from the patient’s secrets and each of them is used as the index of an EHR entry of the patient. An encryption key derived from the pseudonym can be used to encrypt the corresponding EHR entry. The pseudonyms can also be used for the patient proving the ownership of the EHR without disclosing the identity of the patient. Some protocols and remarks for using the pseudonym scheme are also discussed.
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Paper Nr: 32
Title:

The Present and Future of Dynamic e-Health Interoperability in Switzerland - Results of an Online Questionnaire
Authors:

Visara Urovi and Michael I. Schumacher
Abstract: The research in the medical health care systems is shifting towards solutions that enable dynamic data exchange. To achieve this shift, interoperable solutions have been proposed by initiatives such as the integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). IHE focuses on defining interoperable solution by specifying recommendations that foster standard based integration between healthcare systems. Using the results of an online questionnaire, in this work we study the current use of standards in the health care systems of Switzerland. The questionnaire identifies four dynamic data exchange scenarios that enhance the interoperability and the integration between different healthcare systems. The novelty of this work is that the identified scenarios are currently not addressed by the IHE recommendations and, they can improve the current interoperability solutions. The questionnaire confirms that those scenarios are useful and we suggest some technical solutions that may help to achieve them.
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Paper Nr: 45
Title:

Connections of Reduced Performance Health Data for Severe Persistent Uncontrolled Allergic Asthma Treated by Omazulimab
Authors:

Stefanos Matsopoulos and Valentina Plekhanova
Abstract: An application of association rules mining method for the discovery of associations in abnormal quantitative health data for inadequately controlled severe allergic Asthma treated by Omazulimab is presented. To the best of authors’ knowledge, no formal approaches have ever been used for extraction of association rules among dysfunctional elements in Spirometry datasets. Initially is provided an explanation of the procedures used for diagnosing inadequately controlled severe allergic Asthma. Following this, it is conducted critical evaluation of well-known ‘association rule’ mining techniques, in order to identify the one with the best utility for discovery of associations among abnormal elements of Spirometry datasets. Apriori Algorithm is applied to real-life Spirometry datasets to illustrate the contribution of application of association rule mining techniques. This revealed the existence of association rules among dysfunctional Spirometry elements for this disease. Moreover it has been identified that this disease is provoked by association of Spirometry elements that do not function properly as these are provided by Spirometer. This is translated in human factors as a dysfunction of small and medium airways of patients’. Furthermore Spirometry element FEV1, is not as valuable parameter as the European Medical Agency supports. Finally it has been observed that Omazulimab treatment improves respiratory function and makes the connection among associated elements weaker.
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Paper Nr: 46
Title:

A Clinical Data Warehouse Architecture based on the Electronic Healthcare Record Infrastructure
Authors:

Fabrizio Pecoraro, Daniela Luzi and Fabrizio L. Ricci
Abstract: The development of clinical data warehouses is becoming increasingly important in the healthcare domain to support organizations in the improvement of decision-making, business processes as well as the communication between clinicians, patients and the administration. However, data and process integration is a big challenge considering the heterogeneous and distributed nature of healthcare information systems. This paper proposes a data warehouse architecture based on the Italian Electronic Health Record (EHR) technological infrastructure. It describes the main advantages in the application of EHR systems for secondary purposes and reports the data warehouse design framework outlining its architecture as well as a dimensional model based on a dashboard defined to manage the intervention of patients with diabetes. The adoption of EHR systems enhances interoperability given that these systems share standardized clinical data among multiple parties involved in different healthcare settings.
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Paper Nr: 49
Title:

Model based Validation of XML Requirements, Applied on Healthcare IT Standards
Authors:

Abderrazek Boufahja and Eric Poiseau
Abstract: Nonconformity of healthcare implementations to the medical standards has become a real source of troubles and loss of interoperability between systems. Healthcare documents frequently contain inconsistent requirements related to the standards they must conform to. Few standards and methodologies exist to deal with complex requirements, and often they are only dedicated to some specific kinds of healthcare standards, like CDA, HL7 and DICOM. The complexity of standards and their constant evolution have made difficult the implementation of robust check methods and tools for healthcare documents. In this paper, we propose a novel model-based validation methodology, which allows enumerating and validating requirements related to healthcare documents that have XML based structure. Model-based methodology defined and specified in this paper allows checking any kind of requirements even for healthcare documents with complex standards' cascading. Experimentations of model based checking demonstrate that this method was highly effective in detecting inconsistencies, and orienting implementers of healthcare technologies.
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Paper Nr: 53
Title:

Threshold-based Fall Detection on Smart Phones
Authors:

Sebastian Fudickar, Alexander Lindemann and Bettina Schnor
Abstract: This paper evaluates threshold-based fall detection algorithms which use data from acceleration sensors that are part of the current smart phone technology. The evaluation was done with sampled fall records where young people simulate falls. To test the false positive rate of the algorithms, another record set with Activities of the Daily Living (ADLs) from elderlies was used. The results are very promising and show that smart phone sensors are suitable for fall detection. This will offer a new opportunity to assist elderlies in their daily living and extend their period of self-determined living.
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Paper Nr: 60
Title:

Predicting Subjective Well-Being by Smartphone Usage Behaviors
Authors:

Yusong Gao, He Li and Tingshao Zhu
Abstract: Subjective Well-Being (SWB) refers to how people experience the quality of their lives, thus to acquire people’s SWB levels timely and effectively is very important. Self-report and interviewing are mostly used techniques for assessing SWB, but cannot be done in time. This study aims to predict one’s SWB levels by smartphone usage behaviours. We collect users’ smartphone usage and self-reported subjective well-being, and found that several usage behaviours correlate with SWB, especially for females. For example, smartphone users with higher SWB scores tend to use more communicating apps, play more games and read more, but take fewer photos. Based on these findings, we trained a predicting model of user’s SWB based on smartphone usage behaviours, and the accuracy is up to 62%. The result indicates that SWB can be identified based on smartphone usage fairly well.
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Paper Nr: 61
Title:

Mobile Application Design for Health Intermediaries - Considerations for Information Access and Use
Authors:

Izak van Zyl and Retha de la Harpe
Abstract: Health intermediaries in emerging contexts exhibit a diversity of information needs in conducting their professional duties. There is limited understanding, however, as to the complex needs of these groups. Furthermore, there is still a paucity of research on supporting the information needs of intermediaries via technological means. This paper employs a qualitative meta-analysis in unpacking the dynamism of intermediary practice in South Africa. The authors consider mobile application design in accessing and using health information. A number of critical design considerations are presented, including the role of context as a static and dynamic modality. The authors ultimately derive an information model, which assimilates four intersecting dimensions of context.
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Paper Nr: 66
Title:

Divide-n-Discover - Discretization based Data Exploration Framework for Healthcare Analytics
Authors:

Si-Chi Chin, Kiyana Zolfaghar, Senjuti Basu Roy, Ankur Teredesai and Paul Amoroso
Abstract: Insightful and principled visualization techniques may successfully help complex clinical data exploration tasks and aid in the process of knowledge discovery. In this paper, we propose a framework Divide-n-Discover to visualize and explore clinical data effectively, and demonstrate its effectiveness in predicting readmission risk for Congestive Heart Failure patients. Our proposed method provides clinicians a mechanism to dynamically explore the data and to understand how a single factor may influence the risk of readmission for a given patient. For example, our study indicates that patients between age 47 and 48 have 2.63 time higher chance of getting readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, compared to other patients; likewise, patients with length of stay above 13 days are 2.27 times more likely to be readmitted within 30 days. The finding suggests that hospitals might be under pressure to discharge patients within two week while some patients may benefit from a longer stay. These observations may become valid hypotheses leading to further clinical investigation or discoveries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever work that proposes principled discretization and visualization techniques in the hospital readmission risk prediction problem.
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Paper Nr: 70
Title:

The Comprehension of Medical Words - Cross-lingual Experiments in French and Xhosa
Authors:

Natalia Grabar, Izak van Zyl, Retha de la Harpe and Thierry Hamon
Abstract: This paper presents cross-lingual experiments in automatic detection of medical words that may be difficult to understand by patients. The study relies on Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, conducted in three steps, across two languages, French and Xhosa: (1) the French data are processed by NLP methods and tools to reproduce the manual categorization of words as understandable or not; (2) the Xhosa data are clustered with a non-supervised algorithm; (3) an analysis of the Xhosa results and their comparison with the results observed on the French data is performed. Some similarities between the two languages are observed.
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Paper Nr: 78
Title:

Early Detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Mild Alzheimer’s Disease in Elderly using CBF Activation during Verbally-based Cognitive Tests
Authors:

Shohei Kato, Hidetoshi Endo, Risako Nagata, Takuto Sakuma and Keita Watanabe
Abstract: With the goal of promoting a fruitful and healthy longevity society, this paper presents a verbally-based cognitive task and an early detection method of dementia and mild cognitive impairment for elderly. As designed with conscious of daily conversation, the task is done by verbally responding to questionnaire. An elderly firstly talks about the topics of favorite season, travel, gourmet, and daily life, and then he/she does three cognitive tasks of reminiscence, category recall, and working memory. With the use of the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which can measure cerebral blood flow activation non-invasively, we had collected 42 CHs fNIRS signals on frontal and right and left temporal areas from 22 elderly participants (7 males and 15 females between ages of 64 to 89) during cognitive tests in a specialized medical institute. All participates are classified into three clinical groups: elderly individuals with cognitively normal controls (CN), patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In this paper, we report a task effect measurement of the verbally-based cognitive task by the statistical tests of fNIRS signals, and then report the examination of the detection performance by cross-validation using proposed Bayesian classifier, which can discriminate among elderly individuals with three clinical groups: CN, MCI, and AD. Consequently, empirical result indicated that total accuracy rate is more than 95% and the result suggests that proposed approach is adequate practical to screen the elderly with cognitive impairment.
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Paper Nr: 82
Title:

Knowledge Management in Medicine - A Framework to Organize, Browse and Retrieve Medical Data
Authors:

Marios Pitikakis and Imon Banerjee
Abstract: This paper outlines a knowledge-based approach to construct semantically enriched components that can be integrated to form an environment for assisting and supporting medical professionals. We aim at capturing and utilizing invaluable expert knowledge, formalized within ontologies, to improve different kinds of medical diagnosis, monitoring and treatment. Our work is focused on supporting the knowledge management task, targeting the early stage diagnosis of musculoskeletal diseases of the human knee articulation, but is general enough to support similar knowledge management tasks for a wide range of clinical decision-making, research, teaching and learning activities.
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Paper Nr: 83
Title:

Strong and Meaningful Use of Healthcare Information Systems (HIS)
Authors:

Arkalgud Ramaprasad and Thant Syn
Abstract: The translation of science to practice to policy for meaningful use of healthcare information system (HIS) is embedded in a complex milieu of meaningful, meaningless, non-, and mis- use of the system by a variety of stakeholders seeking to manage the cost, quality, safety, and parity of healthcare. The problem of HIS use can be modeled as an ontology which encapsulates the core logic of use. The ontology includes the three components of translation, the four types of use, the key stakeholders, and the four basic outcomes. It is a comprehensive structured natural-language model which can be extended and refined. It is parsimonious and can be easily understood and interpreted by all the stakeholders. We argue that such a model is necessary to develop a roadmap for strengthening the meaningful use of HIS. In its absence meaningful use of HIS will be weak.
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Paper Nr: 84
Title:

Self-Organizing Maps for Event-Related Potential Data Analysis
Authors:

Lukáš Vařeka and Pavel Mautner
Abstract: Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and especially the P300 component have been gaining attention in braincomputer interface design and neurobiological research. The detection of the P300 component in electroencephalographic signal is challenging since its signal-to-noise ratio is very low. Instead of using traditional supervised pattern recognition, this paper discusses using unsupervised neural networks for the P300 classification purposes. To validate the proposed approach, a method for the P300 detection based on matching pursuit and self-organizing maps is proposed and evaluated. The results may be applied to the design of brain-computer interfaces.
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Paper Nr: 88
Title:

Plea for Use of Intelligent Information and Communication Technologies in Infection Surveillance and Benchmarking by Healthcare Institutions
Authors:

Walter Koller, Klaus-Peter Adlassnig, Andrea Rappelsberger and Alexander Blacky
Abstract: Top healthcare and medicine depends on the implementation of best practice methods, which include surveillance of and benchmarking with defined quality indicators. Using healthcare-associated infection (HAI) surveillance as an example, we put forward arguments in favour of automated intelligent information and communication technologies. Assessment studies with our fully automated detection and monitoring system for HAIs not only revealed much higher precision of surveillance results and much less time investment compared with conventional surveillance, but also a potential emerged for amendments and adaptations regarding new input categories or new surveillance outputs desired by clinicians, administrators, and health authorities. In this way, intelligent information and communication technologies are becoming indispensable in building affordable “safety nets” for quality assurance and benchmarking, based on fully automated and intelligent data and knowledge management. These in turn form the backbone of high-level healthcare, patient safety, and error prevention.
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Paper Nr: 89
Title:

How to Collect Consent for an Anonymous Medical Database
Authors:

Emmanuel Benoist and Jan Sliwa
Abstract: The goal of some medical databases is not to support the actual treatment of individual patients, but to provide the platform for medical research. Health data collected in such databases have to be anynomized - they should be analyzed only statistically and should not permit to retrieve the patient’s identity. Medical data collected for research should be anonymized to protect the patients’ privacy. In many countries it is mandatory. In many cases, not only one person treats a patient for a given illness. The documentation of a case requires the collaboration of different physicians that share information. This sharing of information requires the patient to authorise the access to the data stored by one physician by another one. We need therefore to implement a system for collecting the consent of an anonymous person. We present a novel solution to allow the practitioner to collect the consent of the patient in order to access the data recorded for that person. This solution is based on existing infrastructure, such as X509 certificates (present in e-ID or e-Health cards). Patients do not require to acquire any new hardware or to remember any new secret. We produce the fingerprint of the private key of the patient that can be used to re-identify the patient without having to know the identity of the patient (for instance the certificate) or even the patient’s public key.
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Paper Nr: 92
Title:

MongoDB for Electrophysiology Experiments
Authors:

Petr Ježek, Roman Mouček and Jakub Daněk
Abstract: Many efforts are devoted to provide a unified solution for maintaining data from electrophysiological experiments. Because large data collections of heterogeneous nature are obtained, neuroinformatics databases must be robust and flexible. Current database systems are of two types. The first one uses a fixed schema while the second one is schema free. This paper discusses usage of a NoSQL database, MongoDB, for electrophysiological experiments and investigates transformation of existing electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERP) database records in Oracle into MongoDB. Two perspectives, flexibility and performance are discussed. A final approach that profits from combination of both concepts, is also discussed.
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Paper Nr: 93
Title:

SmartCoping - A Mobile Solution for Stress Recognition and Prevention
Authors:

Edith Maier, Ulrich Reimer, Emanuele Laurenzi, Monika Ridinger and Tom Ulmer
Abstract: The paper describes the development of a mobile solution based on smartphones and sensors for the early recognition of stress. The solution is based on real-time capture and analysis of vital data such as heart rate variability as well as activity and contextual data such as location and time of day. Individual recognition patterns for stress are derived from combining vital and contextual data by using subjective stress assessments via mood maps as additional input during an initial learning phase. The reliability of stress alerts and therapeutic impact will be tested in a clinic specialised on the treatment of alcoholics since stress tends to cause craving and therefore trigger relapses.
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Paper Nr: 103
Title:

BRIDG-based Trial Metadata Repository - Need for Standardized Machine Interpretable Trial Descriptions
Authors:

J. van Leeuwen, A. Bucur, B. Claerhout, K. De Schepper, D. Perez-Rey and R. Alonso-Calvo
Abstract: Making information about clinical trials accessible in a machine interpretable way could aid applications both in clinical care and clinical research, such as patient screening, trial recruitment, trial meta-analysis, trial duplication detection and clinical decision support. We present our standards-based trial metadata repository that captures structured trial information and application-specific formalisms and execution logic supporting a range of relevant applications, with a focus on interoperability and machine interpretability to enable more efficient support for clinical research and faster knowledge transfer into care, We further exemplify the use of the Trial Metadata Repository for a patient screening application for clinical trials. Additionally, the mechanisms are described to manage the information model of the repository when the scope is enlarged to additional contexts.
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Paper Nr: 104
Title:

An Architecture for Resilient Ubiquitous Systems
Authors:

Anubis G. M. Rossetto, Claudio F. R. Geyer, Carlos O. Rolim, Valderi R. Q. Leithardt and Luciana Arantes
Abstract: With the perspective of ubiquitous computing becoming more common form of technology in our everyday lives, our increasing dependency on these systems will require them to be always available, failure-free, fully operational and safe. They will also enable more activities to be carried out and provide new opportunities for solving problems. In view of the potential offered by ubiquitous computing and the challenges it raises, this work proposes a self-healing architecture to support ubiquitous applications aimed at healthcare The goal is to continuously provide reliable services to meet their requirements despite changes in the environment. We outline the application scenario and proposed architecture, as well as giving a detailed account of its main modules with particular emphasis on the fault detector.
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Paper Nr: 109
Title:

Distributed ICT Architecture for Developing, Configuring and Monitoring Mobile Embedded Healthcare Systems
Authors:

Finn Overgaard Hansen, Troels Fedder Jensen and Jose Antonio Esparza Isasa
Abstract: This paper presents a system architecture to support remote access to mobile embedded healthcare systems during development and use. It describes the system architecture developed to allow remote debugging, configuration and monitoring of mobile healthcare systems as well as the prototypes that have been developed to explore the architecture. The architecture has been applied in a concrete wearable embedded healthcare system for treatment of leg venous insufficiency through compression therapy.
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Paper Nr: 110
Title:

vAssist: Building the Personal Assistant for Dependent People - Helping Dependent People to Cope with Technology through Speech Interaction
Authors:

H. Sansen, J-l. Baldinger, J. Boudy, G. Chollet, P. Milhorat and S. Schlögl
Abstract: Modern ICT solutions are capable of assisting dependent people at home and therefore able to replace the physical presence of a caregiver. However, the success of such solutions depends on an intuitive access to services. By proposing a speech-operated system and devices that facilitate this voice-based interaction, vAssist aims at a solution that corresponds to a virtual butler. The goal is to build a system with whom elderly users can interact naturally and even build up a social connection. Integrating modern language technology with a human-operated call center should allow for coping with current imperfect solutions and consequently offer the necessary reliability and user experience. vAssist is planned to be launched for German, Italian and French.
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Paper Nr: 125
Title:

Attention of Driver during Simulated Drive
Authors:

Roman Mouček and Vojtěch Košař
Abstract: Attention of drivers is a key factor of road safety. Since inattentive drivers cause a considerable number of accidents, it is worth to examine the causes and course of driver’s attention even in laboratory conditions during a simulated drive. This paper deals with the experiment in which the methods of electroencephalography and event related potentials are used under various conditions to investigate driver’s attention. Eleven participants, university students, were stimulated with audio signals during monotonous drive in four experimental sessions. The hypothesis is that the peak latency of the P3 component increases in time as the driver is more tired from monotonous drive, daytime and sleep deprivation. The background of the used methods, experimental design, participants, data processing, results and final discussion are presented in this paper.
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Paper Nr: 8
Title:

Analytics Driven Application Development for Healthcare Organizations
Authors:

Omar Badreddin, Aladdin Baarah, Austin Chamney, Craig Kuziemsky and Liam Peyton
Abstract: In response to governmental and regulatory mandates, Healthcare organizations are increasingly interested in assessing the efficiency of their care processes and services. Traditional information systems for healthcare have focused on capturing administrative details related to services and resource usage on a departmental or healthcare provider basis. The resulting interoperability challenges make it difficult for analytics and performance management reporting to provide a detailed view of care processes. This paper presents a methodology and an analytics application framework that focuses on performance and efficiency. Starting from performance goals, the application framework development is driven by the identified key performance indicators. This methodology addresses interoperability challenges by defining the minimal dataset required for measuring outcomes of a care process. It enables an information system design that focuses on analytics and minimizes maintenance and integration issues. The application framework is developed in the context of a multi-year case study of a clinical information system for palliative care.
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Paper Nr: 10
Title:

An Intelligent Inference Engine using Ontology based Clinical Pathways for Diagnosis and Management of Diabetes
Authors:

Shreelakshmi G. M., Kavya A. K. Alse, AnanthaKrishna Thantri, Krupesha D. and Srinivas A.
Abstract: ‘Clinical pathways’ for Diabetes Management has attracted the attention of researchers in the last decade. Ontologies have been in use to represent knowledge pertaining to clinical pathways and to arrive at critical patient-specific decisions. This paper proposes an ontological framework to represent the diabetes related data. The main contribution of the paper is in developing an inference model that helps a General Practitioner (GP) to arrive at the most appropriate clinical pathway for a patient specific condition. The mobile application developed for this purpose makes it very useful for a medical practitioner in a remote rural location to follow a systematic process to arrive at patient specific decisions, based on the Ontological inferences received from the remote server.
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Paper Nr: 19
Title:

Quantitative Analysis of Mental Effort Investment using Photoplethysmogram
Authors:

Yongqiang Lyu, Tianshu Yang, Xiaomin Luo, Chun Yu, Lei Wang and Yuanchun Shi
Abstract: Recent studies have shown a close relationship between the mental effort and the photoplethysmograms (PPG), but lack an index which can analyze the invested mental effort quantitatively during the cognitive tasks, which is notable for evaluating user experience in ubiquitous scenarios. In this study, we propose the stress-induced vascular response index (sVRI) to quantify the mental effort invested in cognitive tasks, and verify it via the experiments on aritehmatic tasks with different difficulty levels. The results show an outstanding correlation between the sVRI and the task difficulties, which suggests a dose-response of the sVRI when users perform different cognitive tasks with different difficulties. This is useful for evaluating the user experience in performing cognitive tasks to guide the task or the interaction designs.
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Paper Nr: 22
Title:

The Significance of Data Governance in Healthcare - A Case Study in a Tertiary Care Hospital
Authors:

Sarah Alofaysan, Bandar Alhaqbani, Rana Alseghayyir and Maryam Omar
Abstract: The paper investigates the importance of data governance to healthcare organizations. First, the paper introduces the main pillars of data governance namely, data quality, compliance, and business transformation. The paper then outlines the perceived challenges that may affect the adoption of data governance strategies. The paper then proposes a new framework for data governance within healthcare organizations. More importantly, the paper presents a case study on a leading tertiary care hospital in the Middle East in order to investigate the impact of absence of data governance. 179,450 patients’ data records were analysed within three outpatient clinics. Discrepancies in the total numbers of seen patients were discovered between electronic data records and manually collected data. The main sources of the discrepancies were identified within each clinic and were rooted to the violation of hospital policies, the disregard to data related rules and policies and the lack of accountability on the data entered into the electronic systems. Finally, the paper concludes with identifying research directions that requires further investigation in this area.
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Paper Nr: 26
Title:

Standardizing Biochemistry Dataset for Medical Research
Authors:

Wilfred Bonney, Alexander Doney and Emily Jefferson
Abstract: Harnessing clinical datasets from the repository of electronic health records for research and medical intelligence has become the norm of the 21st century. Clinical datasets present a great opportunity for medical researchers and data analysts to perform cohort selections and data linkages to support better informed clinical decision-making and evidence-based medicine. This paper utilized Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC®) encoding methodology to encode the biochemistry tests in the anonymized biochemistry dataset obtained from the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) at the University of Dundee. Preliminary results indicated that the encoded dataset was flexible in supporting statistical analysis and data mining techniques. Moreover, the results indicated that the LOINC codes cover most of the biochemistry tests used in National Health Service (NHS) Tayside, Scotland.
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Paper Nr: 28
Title:

CHARMing Clinical Pathways - Modeling of Clinical Pathways based on the Goal-Oriented Ontological Framework CHARM
Authors:

Satoshi Nishimura, Genma Nishijima, Yoshinobu Kitamura, Munehiko Sasajima, Toshihiro Takeda, Yasushi Matsumura and Riichiro Mizoguchi
Abstract: Much procedural knowledge in the medical domain, such as clinical practice guidelines, nursing manuals, and clinical pathways (abbreviated to CPs), is documented and shared. This paper concentrates on the CP, which represents a standard time-sequence of actions carried out by clinical staff for each disease. With the aim not of replacing the conventional form of CPs in a clinical setting but of facilitating description and revision of knowledge by knowledge managers, we have proposed CHARM, which is a goal-oriented, tree-structured model based on an ontology of actions. The aim of the work described in this paper is to confirm the practical ability of CHARM to represent medical actions in CPs in a computer-interpretable way, using eight real CPs in Osaka University Hospital. CHARM trees in terms of actions defined clearly in the ontology explicitly represent goals of actions, i.e., why the actions should be needed, and so on, which are implicit in the conventional CPs. We also confirmed the benefits of CHARM for describing/revising CPs by the knowledge mangers in a comparison of the actions in CPs, such as finding commonality among CPs, easy comparison of CPs from a goal-oriented perspective, and explanation of the reasons for differences.
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Paper Nr: 29
Title:

Trying to Fill the Gap between Persons and Health Records - The MedIcona InterPersonal Health Record
Authors:

Federico Cabitza and Iade Gesso
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the concept of InterPersonal Heath Record and its role in the most recent models of health service delivery: such a health record should integrate health-related information with communication and collaboration capabilities that could allow both patients and caregivers co-produce information and knowledge toward prevention and illness treatment and management. We then present MedIcona, a full fledged demonstrator of the IPHR notion developed as free, open-source installation profile of Drupal 7. Its functionalities are aimed at enabling higher levels of user tailoring, content sharing and annotation among patients and their caregivers.
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Paper Nr: 31
Title:

Desing of Full-text Search for Database and Linkedin Social Network in Electrophysiology
Authors:

Jan Štěbeták, Roman Mouček and Jan Koreň
Abstract: EEG/ERP (electroencephalography, event-related potential) laboratories produce experimental data and metadata. Authors’ research group has contributed to the building of a neuroinformatics infrastructure by developing and integrating data management and analytic tools for EEG/ERP research - the EEG/ERP Portal. With the development of the Portal and the increasing amount of data/metadata, a proper full text search mechanism for efficient information retrieval is necessary to improve the user experience. The presented solution combines search over data/metadata stored in an electrophysiological database and in the LinkedIn social network. Open source search engines, criteria, suitable engine selection, and index design are presented. Integration of the full-text solution to the EEG/ERP Portal is described.
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Paper Nr: 34
Title:

Application of UML Connectors for Arranging Medical Archetypes into a Knowledge Base
Authors:

Georgy Kopanitsa
Abstract: To enable the efficient reuse of standard based medical data we propose to develop a higher level information model that will complement the archetype model of ISO 13606. This model will make use of the relationships that are specified in UML to connect medical archetypes into a knowledge base within a repository. UML connectors were analyzed for their ability to be applied in the implementation of a higher level model that will establish relationships between archetypes. An information model was developed using XML Schema notation. The model allows linking different archetypes of one repository into a knowledge base. Presently it supports several relationships and will be advanced in future.
Paper Nr: 37
Title:

Towards a Personalised Health System
Authors:

Peter Weller, Alberto Fernández Gil and Eduardo Alonso
Abstract: This paper presents a Personalized Healthcare System (PHS), a decision support tool that can adapt to changing conditions, such as aging and illness, in individual patients. The system consists of three components: a unique personalised profile, a collection of web based tools and a web based repository for managing interactions between clinicians and tools. The proposed system makes extensive use of software agents, both for collecting the initial information required to construct a personalized profile and for transporting the information needed to use the on-line decision support tools. The paper discusses the operation of a PHS and suggests possible implementation issues.
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Paper Nr: 39
Title:

A Novel Mobile-Cloud based Healthcare Framework for Diabetes
Authors:

Maria Salama and Ahmed Shawish
Abstract: Healthcare is one of the most important sectors in all countries; consuming an average of 9.5% of their domestic product. Among the widely spread endemic diseases, Diabetes is particularly a non-cured one that consumes medical resources, follow-up efforts, regular set of diverse checkups, continual needs for physicians and medical supplies. The current advanced healthcare systems succeeded to be a reservoir of healthcare records focussing on emergency and medical imaging only. At the same time, most of the currently deployed systems cannot provide a daily follow up to patients as well as not being able to help governments to smartly allocate their medical resources. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework that incorporates Mobile and Cloud computing with data mining techniques to efficiently provide a real-time smart healthcare framework for Diabetes. Mobile application is emerged as a widely deployed communication tool between the patients and the proposed system hosted on the Cloud. The Cloud is incorporated to accommodate the system due to its known features that makes it possible to acquire continually fresh data from the field. The data is then processed through smart data mining techniques to extract knowledge and draw conclusions for governments. As discussed in the paper, the proposed framework promises a significant enhancement in the resources allocation and utilization, as well as provides a faster emergency response. The proposed architecture has been simulated using Junosphere, a cloud simulator, and it could represent a significant step towards future smart healthcare systems specialized to cover other endemic diseases.
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Paper Nr: 40
Title:

An Approach Towards Information Quality Management of Electronic Health Records
Authors:

Mohammad Mahdi Mahdavi Amjad, Kamyar Rasta, Martin Gerdes and Rune Fensli
Abstract: Electronic Health Records (EHR) management systems, have gained attention in many countries as public organizations working in health domain (such as hospitals and municipalities) use them to lift the quality of health care. EHRs are considered as the basis for establishing Health Information Service (HIS) systems. In spite of remarkable advantages of EHRs, the lack of quality metrics can reduce the efficiency of high level systems that are based on them. Particularly, it is smart to design a mechanism to assure the quality of data generated by sensors. In this paper, we propose an architecture in which EHRs are enriched with metadata to provide the information quality. Our architecture emphasizes on the quality of EHRs since we believe that the quality aspect of health records has not been contemplated in many commercial systems. We utilize some quality dimensions to produce the total quality metric. Moreover, we show that this architecture can provide quality-based systems with more appropriate inputs.
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Paper Nr: 59
Title:

Human Genome in a Smart Card
Authors:

Mete Akgün, Bekir Ergüner, Ali Osman Bayrak and Mahmut Şamil Sağıroğlu
Abstract: Gene sequencing costs have fallen considerably with advancements in technology in the last 10 years. This cost will be reduced even further in the following years. That means personal genomics will be very possible in the near future. How and where genetic information is stored is the biggest problem for individuals. Furthermore, privacy of genomic data has a great importance because it can be used to identify an individual and it contains privacy-sensitive data. Therefore, privacy-preserving methods for the use of genomic data should be developed. In this paper, we present a method for storing some parts of human genome needed for the disease risk computation in a smart card. Our method uses variations that separate any genome from the reference genome. It selects the variations corresponding to the exonic regions and filters them according to their variant quality and genotype quality. We show that our method can reduce a single whole human genome to the size small enough to be stored in a smart card without abusing the genomic privacy of individuals. Furthermore, we also propose a simple system in which genomic smart cards are used to perform privacy preserving disease risk test.
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Paper Nr: 73
Title:

Graph Management to Improve Querying of Health and Social Data
Authors:

Maria Constanza Pabón, Claudia Roncancio and Martha Millán
Abstract: Large amount of data related to health care are stored in heterogeneous data sources. Independently, social media provides information about people's environment and activities, such as family relationships or patient's habits and social interaction. This information could be used to complement patients medical profiles to improve patient's care. Providing expert users with mechanisms to integrate and query such sources becomes crucial to retrieve information allowing to improve the analysis of patient's situations. This work contributes to facilitating visualization and querying of data coming from such sources. We adopt a graph data model at the conceptual level as it facilitates the integration of structured and semi-structured data. Our purpose is to go a step forward by providing a conceptual query language intended to allow end users, medical domain experts, to retrieve data from heterogeneous data sources by ad hoc queries. In this paper we introduce a set of operators to query data by transforming a graph and we analyze how they fulfill some design features of the conceptual language. These operators allow successive graph transformation to generate subgraphs with filtered data and to derive new relations representing information that is implicit or that is sparse in the data.
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Paper Nr: 74
Title:

Accessible Mobile Application to Support Self Testing for Anticoagulated Patients using a Personal Health Record - Appliying Good Practices
Authors:

Adrián Casado-Rivas, Lourdes Moreno López, Paloma Martínez Fernández and Javier García Guzmán
Abstract: Full adoption of Information Technologies in the healthcare domain is a reality. New paradigms as mobile computing can support a big amount of healthcare needs. The aim of this research work is to present the application of good practices in the design of healthcare information technology following a methodological approach for apps in mobile environments involving fictitious users based on knowledge of real users in the app design. Real users’ needs have been extracted from empirical researches, guidelines and standards, favoring an outstanding role to users. In order to illustrate the approach and provide a resource to designers, a case study showing how to obtain an accessible design is introduced. The mobile app considered supports a Personal Health Record and self testing for anticoagulated patients who are often elderly. The access characteristics of the elderly and their possible disabilities are essential aspects to keep in mind in the design of a mobile user interface. To address users’ needs on the healthcare mobile applications it has been concluded that the requirement elicitation must take into account functional requirements concerning aspects that characterize a disease, and accessibility requirements related to special needs of patients suffering a disease.
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Paper Nr: 76
Title:

Evaluation Framework for Care Coordination & Telehealth Deployment
Authors:

H. Schonenberg, S. Pauws, C. Bescos, C. Westerteicher, C. Maramis, D. Filos, I. Chouvarda, N. Maglaveras, J. G. Cleland and J. Roca
Abstract: Chronic conditions are growing to pandemic proportions. There is evidence that chronic conditions may be managed successfully using telehealth, but this is not leading to large scale deployment. Organisational and structural changes are needed to progress from pilots to real implementations that are integrated in the care routines. The ACT project goes beyond the trial setting to assess programs implementing care coordination (CC) and telehealth (TH) in different EU regions. The aim is to identify best practice organisational and structural processes supporting integration and implementation of telehealth in a care coordination context for routine management of patients with long-term medical conditions. In this report we describe the frame- work of indicators for CC&TH outcomes and drivers that define data elements collected during the project. The evaluation engine is responsible for capturing, monitoring and evaluating CC&TH deployment, using collected data. The evaluation results contribute to the “best practice cookbook” that will facilitate CC&TH deployment at scale. This report also shares what we have learned from a data transfer test case.
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Paper Nr: 86
Title:

Visualization and Off-line Processing of Blood Pressure Signals
Authors:

Anikó Vágner, Béla Vámosi and István Juhász
Abstract: In the public health care it is very common that microcontroller calculates the result of oscillometric blood pressure measurements. In this case the result can be imprecise; it does not inform the patient and the doctor accordingly. The recordings collected by the microcontroller can be sent to an application which runs on a PC. The recording can contain only one measurement or sequence of measurements created during 24 hours. The advantage of the PC side application is that it can use more memory and processor capacity, so it is faster and more precise. The task of the application is to calculate and visualize the values of blood pressure. The application determines the values of the blood pressure based on an oscillometric blood pressure algorithm. The application visualizes the result of each step of the algorithm. The algorithm decides whether the result is acceptable and authentic based on the characteristic of the recording. The other part of the application helps in the validation. It executes the algorithm on mass of the recordings which have result of reference measurement. The application shows the differences between the results of the algorithm and the values of reference. The application helps to qualify the algorithm according to the international standards. The application works well under laboratory circumstances. But application needs further validation so that it can be put to the market.
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Paper Nr: 90
Title:

The Design and Application of an Electronic Health Record System for Digital Health Management
Authors:

Li Li, Zhao Dongsheng, Meng Haibin, Wang Huishu and Wu Feng
Abstract: To detailed elaborate the content and function of the Electrical Health Record system, this paper respectively introduces its data model, function structure, user role, data collection process and deployment model. And the present pilot work of the system is briefly described in 32 units of Guangdong area. The summary in this paper offers a theoretical basis for the further improvement and application of the system, and provides the theoretical basis and practical experience for the exploration of a new mode of digital health management.
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Paper Nr: 91
Title:

Platform to Support the Development of Information Services for Informal and Formal Care
Authors:

Carlos Cardoso, Yosvany Llerena Rodriguez, Miguel Grade, Filipe Augusto, Alexandra Queirós, João Quintas and Nelson Pacheco Rocha
Abstract: This paper presents a platform to support the development of services and applications for informal and formal care, which is based on the principles of the Services Oriented Architecture. In particular, the paper presents the mechanisms that allow the developers a significant freedom to implement and use new types of information objects.
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Paper Nr: 98
Title:

Designing an Effective Social Media Platform for Health Care with Synchronous Video Communication
Authors:

Young Park, Mohan Tanniru and Jiban Khuntia
Abstract: Online social networks are evolving as platforms for health communication among the public, patients, and health professionals. Existing health social network based portals do not provide synchronous -video-based communication features; and are restricted to only text and picture based content sharing. Arguably, healthcare focused online social networks need video based communication for active knowledge sharing between providers and patients, peer-patients, or sharing disease related information through visual media. This study provides a technological framework and design architecture to develop a customizable online healthcare social media network that can incorporate synchronous video communication capability. The design principles and layers that support different types of functionality are described. An evaluation in the context of Rheumatology and back pain patients is underway and will not be discussed in this paper due to page constraints.
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Paper Nr: 100
Title:

Model of Syntactic Compatibility in Workflows for Electrophysiology
Authors:

Jan Štebeták and Roman Moucek
Abstract: Large amounts of EEG/ERP (electroencephalography, event-related potential) data are produced by scientific laboratories. For complex analysis, data are processed by a set of methods sequentially or in parallel. These processes are known as workflows. However, various input/output formats of used methods involve difficulties while putting methods in a pipe. Simple syntactic rules comparing formats of input/output are already used by workflow engines. In electrophysiology, it is necessary to extend these rules due to variety of methods. Therefore, extension of syntactic rules between subsequent methods in a workflow is presented in this paper. The proposed solution allows creating more complex workflows in the domain of electrophysiology.
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Paper Nr: 101
Title:

Information Retrieval in Medicine - An Extensive Experimental Study
Authors:

Roberto Gatta, Mauro Vallati, Berardino De Bari, Nadia Pasinetti, Carlo Cappelli, Ilenia Pirola, Massimo Salvetti, Michela Buglione, Maria L. Muiesan, Stefano M. Magrini and Maurizio Castellano
Abstract: The clinical documents stored in a textual and unstructured manner represent a precious source of information that can be gathered by exploiting Information Retrieval techniques. Classification algorithms, and their composition through Ensemble Methods, can be used for organizing this huge amount of data, but are usually tested on standardized corpora, which significantly differ from actual clinical documents that can be found in a modern hospital. In this paper we present the results of a large experimental analysis conducted on 36,000 clinical documents, generated by three different medical Departments. For the sake of this investigation we propose a new classifier, based on the entropy idea, and test four single algorithms and four ensemble methods. The experimental results show the performance of selected approaches in a real-world environment, and highlights the impact of obsolescence on classification.
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Paper Nr: 106
Title:

Towards the Design of a Mobile Mental Health Self-help System for Emergency Rescuers - A Pilot Study
Authors:

Manning Li and Jie Hou
Abstract: This study explores the psychological need of emergency rescuers and proposes a strategy for addressing these needs through intelligent virtual advisory tools named ERMS. Drawing on the design science paradigm in the information systems discipline, we explore the key design principals that influence the value of the mental self-help system, through iterations of the user requirements elicitation, system design, development and theory testing. This paper focuses on a systematic review of the contemporary research work that weave together to inform our research emphasis and system design. In the next stage, we will propose our research framework, then testing the framework further through large scale experiments. This paper contributes to the advancement of Information Systems theories in the design of virtual advisory systems. It also highlights to practitioners a few important practical guidelines for the design and development of virtual advisory systems.
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Paper Nr: 107
Title:

CarolApp - A Mobile e-Health Software Project for Remote Monitoring of Children enrolled in the Carolina Curriculum
Authors:

Salvatore Cuomo, Pasquale De Michele, Francesco Piccialli, Ennio Del Giudice and Antonella Olivo
Abstract: The Carolina Curriculum for Infants and Toddlers with Special Needs (CCITSN) is a well established assessment curriculum-based for early intervention programs, where sequenced items data collection and analysis allow for monitoring, incremental program change, and recognition of areas of relative strength and weakness in children with mild, moderate, or severe disabilities. Unfortunately, this protocol, and the support developed software C@rolin@, is concerned only with the medical aspects, which are basically recorded with a huge gap of time intervals. Moreover, due to lack of funding in local health care facilities, the medical staff is not able to care adequately the involved children that, as provided by this program, must perform most of the assessment activities in their own homes, supported by parents that often are left alone during the period between two medical visit. In order to reduce the gap between families and medical staff, this paper describes the design and development of CarolApp, a mobile framework that allows, from one side, parents of enrolled children in the Carolina Curriculum to capture situations by using collected photos and videos relating to the behaviors of their children during the assessment period at home and to send these to the ad-hoc social network by means of their mobile devices, and from the others side, medical staff to care adequately the patients in a “remote-way”, analyzing and providing certified feedback, answers and if needed request an additional visit, by following the progress of these children thanks to the received multimedia objects.
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Paper Nr: 108
Title:

Application of Extensible Markup Language (XML) in Medical Research - A Bibliometrical Analysis
Authors:

Thomas Ostermann, Christa Raak and Marc Malik
Abstract: One of the most innovative web standards is the Extensible Markup Language (XML) which allows structured data storage and exchange and the creation of user defined tags for semantic processing. This bibliometrical analysis aims at describing the application of XML in medical research. Medline/PubMed was searched for relevant publications from 1997 to 2010 using the search term “XML” in all fields. All articles were bibliometrically analysed with respect to their year of publication, language, keywords, MESH-Headings, Impact factor, number of authors, number of pages. We found a total of 932 articles on XML from 1998 to 2010 mostly published in English (n=891; 95.6%). The mean impact factor was 1.93  2.75 and increased from 1.78  3.09 before 2005 to 2.12  2.29 after 2005. Analysis of MESH headings led to the conclusion that XML predominantly is used in lab research while clinical and health services research only plays a minor role. As a conclusion, publications on XML impressively show that XML has become a standard for many software-tools and is more and more recognized in handling huge amounts of data. Applications in the field of health informatics are reasonable to expect in the future.
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Paper Nr: 112
Title:

The Use of Computers in Different Age Groups and their Self-reported Neck Symptoms
Authors:

Leena Korpinen, Rauno Pääkkönen and Fabriziomaria Gobba
Abstract: The aim of this paper was to investigate the self-reported physical symptoms in the neck and the use of computers in different age groups. The study was carried out as a cross-sectional study by posting the questionnaire to 15,000 working-age Finns. The daily use of desktop computers at work is quite popular (over 60%) in the age groups 31–40, 41–50, and 51–60. In these same age groups, a very similar percentage of the respondents reported having physical symptoms in the neck as ‘very often’.
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Paper Nr: 113
Title:

Technology in Physical Therapy - Wireless Sensors and the Sensorimotor Training
Authors:

Angelina Thiers, A. l'Orteye, K. Orlowski and T. Schrader
Abstract: The usage of evidence based decision making is supported along the different professions in the health care system. State of the art in the physiotherapy, especially in the sensorimotor training is that the therapy planning mainly based on the experiences of the physiotherapist as well as by the information given by the manufacturer and the literature. The aim of this study is to show, that the wireless sensor s are a benefit in planning as well as during the execution of the therapy. Therefor different assumptions were verified. Additionally, a survey about the acceptance and the benefit of the sensors was made. Ten test persons performed a laterality test and the sensorimotor training on three different exercisers. During the whole training the muscle activity as well as the motion data was document by the usage of wireless sensors. Immediately after the training, all test persons fulfilled the survey. The study revealed that is important to investigate the training in more detail. Nevertheless, most assumptions are seen as basic principles, they could not be verified. The evaluation of the surveys figured out, that the usage of wireless sensors can be seen as an advantage, but the application has to be optimized.
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Paper Nr: 114
Title:

Automatic Creation of an Efficient Image Filter based on the Genetic Algorithm for Evaluation of Veins
Authors:

Koji Kashihara
Abstract: Instead of expensive and complicated diagnostic equipment, low-cost infrared cameras can record vein images noninvasively and simply. However, the recorded image may induce low contrast and a worse signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio. To solve this problem, an effective image filtering method to catch vein shapes will enable the early detection of disease. Therefore, a new filtering method based on the genetic algorithm (GA) with the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm was proposed for the analysis of vein images acquired from a near-infrared (780 nm) CCD camera. The new filter was automatically designed by the GA to modify the worse S/N ratio of vein images, with an unknown correct image answer. If the proposed filtering method is incorporated into the e-healthcare application, it could be widely distributed through smart phones or tablets.
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Paper Nr: 115
Title:

Wireless Monitoring Systems for Enhancing National Health Services in Developing Regions
Authors:

Adelina Basholli, Thomas Lagkas, George Eleftherakis and Peter Bath
Abstract: Sensor based applications and Wireless Technologies introduce sophisticated health methods, especially for patients who need continuous monitoring. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) applied in medical systems provide wireless wearable sensor’s structured architecture, which uses elements of remotely observance and monitoring of home-based patient rehabilitation. The possibility of transmitting and receiving remotely and continuously signals leads to constant monitoring of patient’s vital parameters and real-time exchange of information. Considering Republic of Kosovo as a developing country, this application is considered to provide many benefits. As thought, the system will offer constant monitoring, early detection and prevention of abnormal conditions which are caused from last war or even natural conditions. Current research will present thoroughly examined and observed WBAN related factors which are used for enhancing e-healthcare. Moreover, during our future research we plan to analyze all existing architectures in order to conclude on and propose a unique schema that can be applied on developing regions, like Kosovo, and be beneficial.
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Paper Nr: 119
Title:

Smart Moving Nightstand - For Medical Assistance of Elderly People an Open Project
Authors:

Nicolas Soucies, Jeremie Girouard and Nizar Ouarti
Abstract: We present an open mobile platform that aims to benefit from versatile wireless sensors. This mobile assistant is a robot that can monitor different physiologic data for elderly people. Moreover it has the ability to determine the distance and potentially the position of the elderly person who use it. As an assistant it can transport some “objects” as glasses or drugs. Preliminary results show the proof of concept of our approach with a remote sensor that measures the temperature of the subject. We also present a method to assess the quality of the RSSI signal in order to determine the distance of a zigbee module attached to the arm of the subject. These results are the first steps towards a totally autonomous system that is an open platform. In this platform it will be easy to highlight the interaction or the correlation between the different physiological data and to move the robot properly in case of alert. It is possible to program different services and to integrate new sensors remotely. This platform can be convenient for developers and researchers involved in health technology.
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Paper Nr: 120
Title:

Prediction and Management of Readmission Risk for Congestive Heart Failure
Authors:

Senjuti Basu Roy and Si-Chi Chin
Abstract: This position paper investigates the problem of 30-day readmission risk prediction and management for Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), which has been identified as one of the leading causes of hospitalization, especially for adults older than 65 years. The underlying solution is deeply related to using predictive analytics to compute the readmission risk score of a patient, and investigating respective risk management strategies for her by leveraging statistical analysis or sequence mining techniques. The outcome of this paper leads to developing a framework that suggests appropriate interventions to a patient during a hospital stay, at discharge, or post hospital-discharge period that potentially would reduce her readmission risk. The primary beneficiaries of this paper are the physicians and different entities involved in the pipeline of health care industry, and most importantly, the patients. This paper outlines the opportunities in applying data mining techniques in readmission risk prediction and management, and sheds deeper light on healthcare informatics.
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Paper Nr: 123
Title:

Searching of Correlation of Weather and Cardiologic Events - Computer Methods for Relation Discovery and Events Prediction
Authors:

Błażej Zyglarski, Piotr Bała and Jeremi Mizerski
Abstract: This paper presents our recent research on finding correlation between weather events and medical (cardiologic) events and trends. Such correlation is intuitive, however no solid proof exists. Such correlation was investigated, but it most cases it drives to conclusion that differences are visible in large periods of time (like year seasons, winter for example). We are trying to show, that such correlation is visible in much shorter time periods (as couple of days) with unusual weather behaviour). We examine standard statistical methods, advanced events and trend detection methods and neural networks (self organizing maps) usage. We propose basic scenarios for medical events frequency increase prediction, according to weather forecasts.
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Paper Nr: 124
Title:

Electronic Records for General Practice - Where we Are, Where we should Head to Improve Them
Authors:

Federico Cabitza, Francesco Del Zotti and Paolo Misericordia
Abstract: In this paper we present the findings of a country-wide survey that was aimed at getting a comprehensive picture of the current level of adoption and appropriation of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) by General Practitioners (GPs). In this survey, which collected the responses from 800 Italian GPs coming from all over the country and exhibiting different experience and ICT skills, we investigated the level of current satisfaction of users with respect to two classes of functional and non-functional features of current EMRs, namely “core” and “advanced” ones. We also tried to detect which of these features are valued most highly by the current EMR users in order to inform prospective users, EMR vendors and policy makers in the eHealth domain. We also focused on the impact that digitization has had so far on General Practice, as it is perceived from the perspective of the front-line users (i.e., doctors). Finally we also addressed how the use of ICT could change in the near future as a tool to facilitate doctor patient communication and collaboration.
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