Report on Research Directions in Health Informatics Engineering and Systems

1. 3rd International Symposium on Foundations of Health Informatics Engineering and Systems (FHIES), August 2013, United Nations University, Macau Report on Research Directions in Health Informatics Engineering and Systems

2. FHIES Symposium: Key Research Areas • Modelling, building and certifying software-intensive ICT systems in Healthcare; • Software Engineering: formal methods • Embedded software in medical devices: patient safety, efficacy, and interfacing; • Security & privacy for e-Health Information; • Workflow support and inter-operability in Healthcare; and • Healthcare ICT applications in the Developing World.

3. FHIES 2013: Interesting Paper Publication Process • Submission 1; • Peer Review 1; • Submission 2; • Pre-Proceedings – community distribution; • Peer Review 2: Symposium paper discussion, comments, suggestions; • Submission 3; • Peer-review 3 • Submission 4: • Post-Proceedings (LNCS Series) – open distribution and indexing in electronic databases (possibly in 2014) • Special Issue Journal Invitation (new cycle of peer reviews!!)

4. Purpose of Attendance: Paper Presentations • Dube K, Zanamwe N, Thomson JS, Mtenzi FJ and Hapanyengwi GT; Modeling the Meal Planning Problem to Exploit Knowledge from National and International Nutrition Guidelines for Use in Mobile Web-Based HIV/AIDS Nutrition Therapy Applications; • DubeK and Gallagher T; Approach and Method for Generating Realistic Synthetic e-Healthcare Records (RS-EHR) for Secondary Use; • Dube K; Health Informatics in the Developing World: Is this Our Problem? NB: The works presented in these papers will be presented later in our CSIT Research Presentation Series

5. Interesting Highlights - 1 • Mobile Computing: Use of Voice as Interface to Information Systems – the $1Billion Industry (Microsoft in Chhatisgarh, India); • 85-90% mobile phone penetration; • Use mobile phones to improve communication between communities and regional administrators; • DocTalk: • health messages for health behaviors in health conditions, e.g., pregnancy • broadcasting voice messages to more than one patient; • News websites based on voice contents only => news uploaded as voice phone messages: • How to index and search for news items? • How to preserve privacy & anonymity of news contributors?

6. Interesting Highlights - 2 • Heal Thyself: • facilitating patient self-care – a neglected area of engineering research, • Closed social media for healthcare – diabetes self-management in young people (teenagers); • Empathy in design - human factors in healthcare: • Bio-Medical Engineer 2nd top job after Actuary worldwide; • Example failures: • Ballot paper design – Bush vs Al Gore, and • Medication bottle labels – obscure instructions • If microwave oven are still difficult to operate, then are life critical medical devices any better? (video) • Adverse events in healthcare (video)due to poor human factors design

7. Interesting Highlights 3: Professor Jane Win Shih Liu: Research Issues in Smart Homes and Elderly Care • Views on elderly care technology support: • Elders should not to be treated as fragile pets and need no monitoring; • Elders need to be assisted to remain active for longer periods of their lives; • Elders need to be empowered to do things they find difficult to do; • Key elderly support principle: To live well (active and healthy), then die fast; • Implications on smart home research: • Invasive monitoring using smart sensors neither priority nor desirable from elderly perspective => need for new definition and research agenda for Smart Homes; • Research on technologies to facilitate the key support principle, without monitoring; • Research on technologies that live with a person and get smarter as the person’s ability diminishes due to age without introducing remote sensing and monitoring. • Does not disallow the role of sensors in extreme life-threatening events;

8. Discussion/Questions? FHIES 2013, August 20 – 23, United Nations University, Macau