eHealth is the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for health. Examples include treating patients, conducting research, educating the health workforce, tracking diseases and monitoring public health.
mHealth or mobile health as medical and public health practice supported by mobile devices, such as mobile phones, patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other wireless devices.
The Group was established to extend the IKMBs research foci to the broad field of eHealth and mHealth topics. These new technologies can enrich clinical healthcare and research with new possibilities of treatment, diagnosis, study designs and collection of detailed and structured data.
The main objective of the group is to develop a system to collect data from participants and patients, which will not only collect diary data from the user but it will also help the user to manage his illness and creates a bidirectional communication channel to the medical professionals. Enhanced with the ability to collect data automatically by the use of different sensors and medical devices. There are five main goals which are considered from the beginning of the development of system. The first two, privacy and security, strongly belong together. The system must be developed by the principle “privacy by design” from the start, the high security standards for medical information systems and beyond must be used and highly established and sophisticated cryptographic methods must be used. The third aim is interoperability. It must be easy to integrate the system in healthcare information systems and research information systems and to deliver highly structured data to these systems. Fourth the system must be highly adaptable to every medical situation and research purpose. The last aim is usability. If the users don’t feel familiar with the user interface they will not use it.
Currently the focus of the group is directed to concepts for end to end encryption and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources).
Beside the main project the group investigates new technologies and tests new concepts by developing tools for different projects and carrying out research projects:
- Online Questionnaire Tool
- Questionnaire App on mobile device
- Benchmarking of Fitness Trackers and assessment of their APIs