SAPHIRE patient-monitoring system enters testing phase
An EU-funded project developing an intelligent healthcare monitoring and decision-support system is about to start testing two applications. Now that the technical implementation has been completed, the SAPHIRE project's pilot studies will involve monitoring cardiovascular patients in a hospital in Romania and in homecare in Germany. The system that SAPHIRE is creating could ultimately help to transfer patients from critical care units to regular wards more quickly and to train young doctors, reducing the potential for errors in treatment. SAPHIRE tries to integrate wireless medical sensor data with hospital information on a single platform, building on the results of another EU-funded project called ARTEMIS. One of the main problems experienced by similar projects has been the incompatibility of data stored on different platforms in numerous formats. In order to overcome this problem, the SAPHIRE researchers first used ontology mapping, a method for the automation of communication between computer systems. 'Later on, we noticed that XSLT mapping can also perform some of the conversions adequately in much shorter time,' says Mehmet Olduz of the Software Research and Development Centre at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara. 'So, the team included XSLT mapping ability as well as ontology mapping which has given a considerable performance improvement to the system.' XSLT or Extensible Style Sheet Language Transformation can convert documents written in Extensible Markup Language (XML), a Web 2.0 programming language, to another type. As a result, the method can translate medical records into a standard format and integrate them with patients' vital signs, which are measured in real-time. For the medical records, the SAPHIRE project employs a widely accepted standard that is also used in many national healthcare networks. 'I think what makes SAPHIRE unique is the semi-automatic deployment of clinical guidelines to healthcare institutes,' Mr Olduz explains. These guidelines are based on medical research and experience and suggest the most reasonable treatment route to be taken in a particular situation. SAPHIRE has incorporated a function that automatically checks these guidelines against patients' symptoms and vital signs on a regular basis, all the while securing confidentiality and privacy of data. The SAPHIRE project involves seven partners from Turkey, Greece, France, Germany and Romania. It receives just over €2 million in funding under the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6).