Friday, May 15, 2009

Start-up Workshop 19th May 2009 at TKK

UBI-SERV START-UP WORKSHOP 19TH MAY 2009 AT TKK

Ubiquitous Services and Technologies for Healthcare, Wellbeing and Public Safety in China and Finland

http://www.ubi-serv.org

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Iiro Jantunen, Mika Husso, Prof. Jyri Hämäläinen, Timo Korhonen, Edward Mutafungwa, Xirui Wang, Zhong Zheng.

VENUE

Lecture hall S4 (morning session), Internet Café (afternoon session). TKK Faculty of Electronics, Communications and Automation, Otakaari 5, Espoo.

INVITED SPEAKERS
  • Timo Itälä, senior researcher, SoberIT / TKK
  • Eija Kaasinen, research coordinator, VTT Technical Research Center of Finland
  • Vesa Pakarinen, senior research scientist, VTT Technical Research Center of Finland
  • Päivi Topo, academy research fellow, THL National Institute for Health and Welfare
  • Yuping Zhao, professor, PKU Peking University
SCHEDULE

Morning session 9:00 - 12:30 at S4

9:00 Reception, coffee

9:30 Welcome words and UBI-SERV project presented (slides), Timo Korhonen

9:55 PKU and UBI-SERV (slides), Yuping Zhao

10:20 Agile Citizen-centric Health (slides), Timo Itälä

10:45 Coffee break

11:00 Aging population, care services and needs for ambient technology (slides), Päivi Topo

11:25 Pervasive health care technologies, Continua Health Alliance, HL7 (slides), Vesa Pakarinen

11:50 MIMOSA-MINAmI, human-centered design, ethics (slides), Eija Kaasinen

Lunch 12:15 - 13:15

Afternoon session 13:15 - 16:30 at Internet Café

13:15 Briefing for the group sessions, Iiro Jantunen

13:30 Group sessions

14:30 Coffee break

14:45 Wrap-up of the group work, Group chairmen

15:00 Panel discussion, chair: Jyri Hämäläinen
Panelists: Eija Kaasinen, Timo Korhonen, Vesa Pakarinen, Yuping Zhao

16:00 Workshop conclusions

16:30 Workshop ends

REGISTRATION

Preferably contact iiro.jantunen@tkk.fi latest at 12:00 AM 18th May 2009 so that your presence can be taken into account in servings and group work planning.

Continua Health Alliance

Continua Health Alliance provides a nice video of its vision of the future of health care. Very informative to watch. One must note that not only technological advances, but the user needs, user acceptance and ethical issues need to be taken into account.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Social networking software for research programmes?

UBI-SERV project belongs to Academy of Finland research program MOTIVE, which had a start-up seminar in Helsinki this week.

This kind of seminars are very good for researcher networking, and also for project networking. I am arranging visits to two of our sibling projects within MOTIVE. I would be happy to link to them here, but not all the projects within MOTIVE have websites of their own. Web 2.0 type communications is embraced only by a minority of the projects. Of course, the project related to Web 2.0 development (Somus) does extensively use these technologies, e.g. blogging and microblogging. Also Web 2.0 type collaboration tools are used.

The type of Web 2.0 application not used in MOTIVE for research collaboration is Facebook-type online social networking. A research project could have a profile in such a service, with other related projects as "friend" projects. This would make it easier to keep up with the developments within related projects. Know any such service?

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Highlights of Chinese Medical Reformation

Date: 07-05-2009
Topic: Highlights of Chinese Medical Reformation
Keywords: 850 Billion RMB Cake - ICT Medical Market Opportunity

The official implementation of Chinese medical reform plan has been passed for one month. There are many new opportunities, changes and hopes, as well as questions and difficulties. The ultimate goal of this reformation is to provide a universal health care to whole 1.3 billion Chinese people, by the year of 2020.

There is one thing I want to highlight , which could probably affect our project. It is the 850 billion RMB (94.4 billion Euros) financing support from the central government and following province governments. This immense amount of funds will be allocated during next three years, to rural area patients, medicine industry, different levels of hospitals, community health centers, etc.

It is estimated that the total amount of fund dedicated to health care ICT sector reaches as high as 1.2 billion Euros, which brings huge market potential in this area. Last month, two important events have been hold, the 61st China International Medical Equipment Fair (CMEF) and 2009 China International Medical Electronics Assembly (CMET). These two events drawn the attentions of participant from more than 20 countries and regions, and around 2000 enterprises. IT giants such as Intel, Microsoft and IBM all shows the solutions towards e-health. Particularly for IBM, it demonstrated the radiology theatre solution based on Blue Spruce. The solution is essentially a common platform where enables medical personals to browse the relevant diagnostic data, such as CT scan, MRI, ECG, etc.

Without any doubt, the market of ICT health care in China will be the hop spot, especially during the economical recession time. However, there comes the question, who will finally get the share of this giant cake? And with what kind of applications or services? (These questions could be asked during the interview with Neusoft.)

Interesting Links:
1. http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/2308160/
Medical Reform in China Indicates A Huge IT Market
2. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jNzxAN_S9OUeWa6mrLT7gcAfmZXA
China’s Poor Hope Reforms Fix Health Problem
3. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ibm_announces_web-based_radiology_theatre.php
IBM’s web-based radiology theatre
4. http://bn.china-embassy.org/eng/zgxw/t556231.htm
Chronology of Chinese health reform