iCareNet – Intelligent Context­Aware Systems for Healthcare, Wellness, and Assisted Living

The “Intelligent Context­Aware Systems for Healthcare, Wellness, and Assisted Living” (iCareNet for short) project was an EU funded Initial Training Network (ITN). iCareNet focused on healthcare, wellness, and assisted living (HWA) applications and made a decisive contribution towards solutions, leveraged through an interdisciplinary perspective ranging from sensing and sensor integration, to human-computer interaction and social factors involved in the deployment of context-aware applications.

iCareNet involved 20 early stage researchers (fellows), and I was supervising Steven Houben who worked on multi-device configuration work in distributed interaction with a special focus on support for clinical work. As part of this project, we designed and implemented different approaches and technologies for multi-device interaction, including:

  • coActivity Manager is a new desktop interface that is designed for collaborative knowledge work. Rather than focusing on files and folders, coActivityManager introduces ‘activity‘ as a first-class concept and provides a dedicated desktop workspace for activity-based computing (ABC) in a desktop interface [1].
  • Hybrid Patient Record (HyPR) and SmartWard – a set of technologies designed to link paper-based (physical) and electronic (digital) medical records [2, 3, 4].
  • ActivitySpaces uses an interactive surface (e.g., a desk or meeting table) as a configuration space that allows users to interconnect and move information between devices on top of it [5].
  • NooSphere is an activity-centric service-based infrastructure and programming framework to support the development and deployment of distributed interactive systems [6].

Partners & Funding

iCareNet united efforts of an interdisciplinary network of leading European research groups and a strong industrial and clinical participation. The network comprised of 11 full partners and more than 10 associate partners from several countries including Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Israel, and the Netherlands.

iCareNet received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7 (2007-2013) under REA grant agreement no 264738.

References

[1] [pdf] [doi] S. Houben, J. E. Bardram, J. Vermeulen, K. Luyten, and K. Coninx, “Activity-centric support for ad hoc knowledge work: a case study of co-activity manager,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY, USA, 2013, p. 2263–2272.
[Bibtex]
@inproceedings{houben:2013,
author = {Houben, Steven and Bardram, Jakob E. and Vermeulen, Jo and Luyten, Kris and Coninx, Karin},
title = {Activity-centric support for ad hoc knowledge work: a case study of co-activity manager},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
series = {CHI '13},
year = {2013},
isbn = {978-1-4503-1899-0},
location = {Paris, France},
pages = {2263--2272},
numpages = {10},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2470654.2481312},
doi = {10.1145/2470654.2481312},
acmid = {2481312},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {activity theory, activity-centric computing, collaborative work, desktop interface},
tag={abc,conference},
pdf={p2263-houben.pdf},
}
[2] [pdf] [doi] S. Houben, M. Frost, and J. E. Bardram, “HyPR Device: Mobile Support for Hybrid Patient Records,” in Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, New York, NY, USA, 2014, p. 249–258.
[Bibtex]
@inproceedings{houben:hypr:2014,
author = {Houben, Steven and Frost, Mads and Bardram, Jakob E.},
title = {HyPR Device: Mobile Support for Hybrid Patient Records},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces},
series = {ITS '14},
year = {2014},
isbn = {978-1-4503-2587-5},
location = {Dresden, Germany},
pages = {249--258},
numpages = {10},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2669485.2669502},
doi = {10.1145/2669485.2669502},
acmid = {2669502},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {ehr, electronic health record, hospitals, hybrid patient record, hypr, nomadic work},
pdf = {ITS2014.HyPR.pdf},
tag = {conference,phc},
}
[3] [pdf] S. Houben, M. Frost, and J. E. Bardram, “Collaborative Affordances of Hybrid Patient Record Technologies in Medical Work,” in Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 2015, p. 785–797.
[Bibtex]
@inproceedings{houben2015collaborative,
title={Collaborative Affordances of Hybrid Patient Record Technologies in Medical Work},
author={Houben, Steven and Frost, Mads and Bardram, Jakob E},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work \& Social Computing},
pages={785--797},
year={2015},
organization={ACM},
pdf={hypr.cscw.2015.pdf},
tag={conference,phc},
}
[4] [pdf] [doi] J. E. Bardram and S. Houben, “Collaborative Affordances of Medical Records,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 27, iss. 1, p. 1–36, 2018.
[Bibtex]
@Article{bardram2018,
author="Bardram, Jakob E. and Houben, Steven",
title="Collaborative Affordances of Medical Records",
journal="Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)",
year="2018",
month="Feb",
day="01",
volume="27",
number="1",
pages="1--36",
abstract="This article proposes the concept of Collaborative Affordances to describe physical and digital properties (i.e., affordances) of an artifact, which affords coordination and collaboration in work. Collaborative Affordances build directly on Gibson (1977)'s affordance concept and extends the work by Sellen and Harper (2003) on the affordances of physical paper. Sellen and Harper describe how the physical properties of paper affords easy reading, navigation, mark-up, and writing, but focuses, we argue, mainly on individual use of paper and digital technology. As an extension to this, Collaborative Affordances focusses on the properties of physical and digital artifacts that affords collaborative activities. We apply the concept of Collaborative Affordances to the study of paper-based and electronic patient records in hospitals and detail how they afford collaboration through four types of Collaborative Affordances; being portable across patient wards and the entire hospital, by providing collocated access, by providing a shared overview of medical data, and by giving clinicians ways to maintain mutual awareness. We then discuss how the concept of Collaborative Affordances can be used in the design of new technology by providing a design study of a `Hybrid Patient Record' (HyPR), which is designed to seamlessly blend and integrate paper-based with electronic patient records.",
issn="1573-7551",
doi="10.1007/s10606-017-9298-5",
url="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9298-5"
}
[5] [pdf] [doi] S. Houben, P. Tell, and J. E. Bardram, “ActivitySpace: Managing Device Ecologies in an Activity-Centric Configuration Space,” in Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, New York, NY, USA, 2014, p. 119–128.
[Bibtex]
@inproceedings{houben:2014,
author = {Houben, Steven and Tell, Paolo and Bardram, Jakob E.},
title = {ActivitySpace: Managing Device Ecologies in an Activity-Centric Configuration Space},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces},
series = {ITS '14},
year = {2014},
isbn = {978-1-4503-2587-5},
location = {Dresden, Germany},
pages = {119--128},
numpages = {10},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2669485.2669493},
doi = {10.1145/2669485.2669493},
acmid = {2669493},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {activity configuration, activity-centric computing, configuration space, configuration work},
pdf = {ITS2014.ActivitySpace.pdf},
tag = {conference,abc},
}
[6] [pdf] S. Houben, S. Nielsen, M. Esbensen, and J. E. Bardram, “NooSphere: an activity-centric infrastructure for distributed interaction,” in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, 2013, p. 13.
[Bibtex]
@inproceedings{houben2013noosphere,
title={NooSphere: an activity-centric infrastructure for distributed interaction},
author={Houben, Steven and Nielsen, S{\o}ren and Esbensen, Morten and Bardram, Jakob E},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia},
pages={13},
year={2013},
organization={ACM},
tag={conference,abc,nexgsd}
}