MONARCA - MONitoring, treAtment and pRediCtion of bipolAr Disorder Episodes

MONARCA will develop and validate solutions for multi-parametric, long term monitoring of behavioural and physiological information relevant to bipolar disorder. It will combine those solutions with an appropriate platform and a set of services into an innovative system for management, treatment, and selftreatment of the disease. more...

小精灵 - Jingling Genies

Context-Sensitive Services Developed in Global Collaboration Project (Jingling Genies)

Research in context-sensitive services aims at providing services operating across different contexts, e.g. location, time, language/culture or work/private life. However, current technologies for service-oriented computing have no explicit notion of context. A central hypothesis of the project is that a well-founded notion of context can provide flexible, test ab le and maintainable context-sensitive services.

Way-finding is an example of context-sensitive services that has already proven to be both commercially important and intellectually challenging. The challenges range from technical challenges of improving accuracy of sensing context information, foundational and software architectural issues to user involvement and ethical issues related to tracking and surveillance. Beyond today’s way-finding services based on GPS and maps, we believe there is a new class of context-sensitive pervasive services allowing users to be guided by voice, sounds and visual signals integrated into the environment, instead of being guided by explicit routes shown on displays.

See the project website for more information - 小精灵 - Jingling Genie

Collaborative Mini-Grids for Prediction of Viral RNA Structure and Evolution

Computer power versus biological sequence data. The blue
curve represents Moore's Law. The red curve represents
biological sequence data stored at Genbank.

The Collaborative Mini-Grid project aims at designing a collaborative, peer-to-peer software architecture for distributed bioinformatics algorithms, which makes research into RNA-based diseases like HIV, SARS, and bird flu more efficient than with current approaches. The project is interdisciplinary and involves researchers from computer science, bioinformatics, molecular biology, and nanotechnology. The partners involve the The IT University of Copenhagen, the Department of Molecular Biology, at the interdisciplinary nanoscience centre (iNANO) at the University of Aarhus (AU), and CLC Bio.

The overall objective is to make theoretical and practical research into RNA-based diseases more efficient than with current, available methods. This is done by making bioinformatics software for theoretical analysis of RNA available for practical use in a biology laboratory. Detailed analyses on large amounts of data and extensive search in large databases are done in this kind of research. Efficiency is obtained by developing software systems, which utilize existing low-cost computers (e.g. PCs) for analysis and by making such distributed parallel computing much more user-friendly and robust than existing approaches. This implies that such analyses can be done by non-technical persons, including biologists working in the laboratory. The specific goal is to create a general-purpose distributed software infrastructure for bioinformatics research in a biology laboratory, including support for distributed computation and database searches, which makes RNA analysis more efficient, while ensuring that more researchers can actually perform them.

Activity-Based Computing

Based on studies of medical work it is evident that conventional computer technology designed for office use is inadequate for use in a hospital setting. Clinical work is characterized as being hectic, nomadic, collaborative, ad hoc, and interrupted – attributes that are in strong contrast to normal office work. In a hospital setting such a basic thing for desktop computers as a desk and a chair does simply not exist. Hence, there is a need for creating fundamental new concepts for creating computer systems in a hospital environment.

The activity-based computing (ABC) project researches pervasive computing support for clinical hospital work. Such technologies have potential for supporting the mobile, collaborative, and disruptive use of heterogeneous embedded devices in a hospital. The basic computational unit is no longer the file (a document) or the application (MS Word) but the work activity of a user. Users can simply carry with them the various work activities in which they are engaged within the hospital and seamlessly transfer these from one computer to another. Actually, we no longer talk about ‘computers’ anymore but about ‘public displays’. These public displays are embedded in floors, walls, medicine cabinets, beds, etc.

See the project website for more information - http://www.activity-based-computing.org/.

Trustworthy Pervasive Healthcare Services (TrustCare)

Computers and digital services are increasingly pervading the everyday life of most people at work and privately. This development possesses great opportunities as well as significant challenges, in particular in the development and deployment of technologies for healthcare services.

By nature, healthcare services involve coordination of a heterogeneous set of professionals, patients, organizations, and sectors; is highly safety critical; deals with sensitive medical data; and must be able to support dynamic changes to adapt to inevitable evolution of treatment processes and unforeseen events.

The overall goal of TrustCare is to address these challenges in a strategic and interdisciplinary research effort aimed at innovation of effective and trustworthy it-support for pervasive healthcare services in collaboration with the industrial partner, as well as innovation in research across areas in experimental and theoretical research in computer science

See the project website for more information - TrustCare Project Homepage.

Context-Aware Computing

Context-awareness covers the idea of computers reacting upon, and adapting to the user’s context, e.g. location, time of day, the specific task the user is engaged in, etc. Context is sensed by tracking location of persons and objects, through sensors in the environment, and by trying to understand what the user is doing, by e.g. looking in his or her calendar.

As a basic infrastructure for enabling context-awareness in hospitals we have created the Java Context-Awareness Framework (JCAF). This framework is used as a basic service in many of the other projects, including the Activity-Based Computing framework, the AWARE architecture, and in the creating of the proximity-based user authentication mechanisms.

See the project website for more information - http://www.daimi.au.dk/~bardram/jcaf/

Context-Based Workplace Awareness

This research looks into how context-aware technologies can help users maintain a social awareness on the activities of each other. This kind of technology helps users time collaboration and hence reduce unwanted interruptions.

See the project website for more information - AWARE Project

Security, Usability, and User Authentication

Over a long period I have been investigating the relationship between usability and security. More specifically, I have investigated issues related to user authentication. The background for this research are observational studies on hospital which revealed that clinicians spend lots of time and effort on getting access to electronic medical systems. In order to mitigate these problems, I have designed technologies for easy user authentication, including systems for "Proximity-Based User Authentication", and "Collective Login".

See the project website for more information - Security, Usability, and User Authentication