[Talks][DB Seminar] Prof. George Samaras: Digital Collaborative Teams for Home Healthcare

Prof. George Samaras
University of Cyprus

Free pizza will be provided to attendees starting at 11:45 a.m., SENSQ 5317

Digital Collaborative Teams for Home Healthcare

Abstract: E-health, in particular Mobile e-health, is an environment seeing dramatic progress over the last few years. A principal aim of DITIS (ΔΙΤΗΣ, in Greek, stands for: Network for Medical Collaboration) is a system that supports dynamic Virtual Collaborative HealthCare Teams dealing with the home-healthcare. It supports the dynamic creation, management and co-ordination of virtual healthcare teams, for the continuous treatment of the patient. Contrary to today’s health processing structure, which is in all practical terms facility based care, this project aims to shift the focus onto home-based care, where everything is moving around the patient. The virtual healthcare team will be able to provide dedicated, personalized and private service to the home residing patient on a need based and in timely fashion, under the direction of the treating specialist. Thus, it is expected that chronic and severe patients, such as cancer patients, can enjoy ‘optimum’ health service in the comfort of their home (i.e., a focus on wellness), feeling safe and secure that in case of a change in their condition the health care team will be (virtually) present to support them.

Currently, DITIS is deployed as an Internet (web) based Group Collaboration system with secure fixed and mobile (GPRS/GSM/WAP) connectivity and supports the Cyprus Association of Cancer Patients and Friends who offer home-care services for cancer patients in Cyprus. It employs Mobile Agents, Web Databases with Java Database Connectivity for storage and processing of information, including Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and international coding of diagnosis and health care protocols pertinent to cancer patients. Twenty health-care professionals are being trained to use the system, caring for over 500 patients.

Bio: George Samaras (Ph.D.) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Cyprus. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, in 1989. He served as the lead architect of IBM's distributed commit architecture (1990-94) and co-authored the final publication of the architecture (IBM Book, SC31-8134-00, September 1994). He was member of IBM's wireless division at RTP. His work on utilizing mobile agents for Web database access has received the best paper award of the 1999 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE´99). He has been invited as a program committee member in most conferences and workshops on mobile databases, mobile commerce and mobile computing. He has a number of patents relating to transaction processing technology and numerous book chapters, technical conference and journal publications. He has served as proposal evaluator at a national and international level and he is regularly invited by the European Commission to serve as an external project evaluator and auditor for the ESPRIT and IST Programs (FP5, FP6, FP7). In addition he served as a technology advisor and consultant at an international and local level in numerous occasions His research interest includes mobile and wireless computing (models and interfaces), context based services, personalization for the wireless environment,
web computing, transaction processing, eServices (eHealth, eGovernment, eLearning). He also served on IBM's internal international standards committees for issues related to distributed transaction processing (OSI/TP, XOPEN, OMG).