The Laboratory is focusing on various aspects of biomedical informatics, such as:
- Semantic integration and analysis of multilevel biomedical data
- Design and development of novel decision support techniques, algorithms, tools and systems
- Affective Computing
- Personalized Healthcare Services and mHealth Systems
Biomedical Informatics
The Laboratory is focusing on various aspects of biomedical informatics, such as:
- Ontology based integration and analysis of multilevel biomedical data
- High performance computational approaches to demanding biomedical applications
- The Semantic interoperability (SIOp) of health information systems
The SIOp of health information systems is a key ingredient for meeting present and future challenges of health systems like an ageing population or political pressure to reduce costs. The challenges for semantic interoperability result both from the clinical settings perspective of seamless care provision across all elements of the health care value system (like disease management programs, clinical pathways) and from the research perspective of integrating life sciences and medical information and knowledge.
Automated Diagnosis and Clinical Decision Support Systems
We focus on the processing and analysis of biomedical signals (e.g. ECG, EMG), images and video. Currently we are developing innovative computer methods and DSS for vision-based human motion detection, analysis and recognition with application in epilepsy and other neurological diseases.In addition the Lab focuses on the analysis of the human way of walking, termed gait, which can be used in several medical and patient telemonitoring applications. The lab is actively developing innovative methods for gait recognition and fall detection by developing algorithmic solutions that fuse motion and spatio-temporal templates of sequences of silhouette images, and silhouette templates.
Affective Computing and Serious Games
Affective Computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion or other affective phenomena. Emotion is fundamental to human experience, influencing cognition, perception, and everyday tasks such as learning, communication, and even rational decision-making. Our research focuses on the development of new technologies that advance basic understanding of affect and its role in human experience, with a particular emphasis on neurological disorders.
Our research focuses on: (1) Designing new ways for people to communicate affective-cognitive states, especially through application of novel wearable sensors and new machine learning algorithms that jointly analyze multimodal channels of information (EEG, video, etc), and (2) Developing algorithms and techniques to assess frustration, stress, and mood indirectly, through natural interaction and conversation.
In this context the Lab is active on research in the domain of Serious Games. Reduced to its formal essence, a game is an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some limiting context. A more conventional definition would say that a game is a context with rules among adversaries trying to win objectives. We are concerned with serious games in the sense that these games have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement. We are currently studying the applicability of such innovative solutions for the identification and evaluation of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Personalized Healthcare Services and pervasive mHealth Systems
Modern mobile healthcare systems, supported by information and communication technologies, provide solutions for improving illness prevention, facilitating chronic disease management, empowering patients and enabling personalization of care thus improving the productivity of healthcare provisioning.
Personalized healthcare emphasizes on the use of information about an individual/patient to select or optimize patient’s preventative, therapeutic care and wellbeing. Modern personalized, pervasive healthcare solutions include smart medical sensors, remote monitoring, smart-phone enabled data aggregation, medical awareness and analysis, and context-aware assistive living technologies.
Our research – in this area – focuses on:
- Mobile and wireless technologies for healthcare delivery and enhanced monitoring
- Wearable, outdoor and home based applications
- Wireless, mobile and wearable devices for pervasive healthcare
- Healthcare telemetry and telemedicine, remote diagnosis and patient management
- Service-oriented middleware architecture for medical device connectivity in personal health monitoring applications
- Social media pervasive technologies for healthcare