Leading Australian e-Health Research Centre Joins
International Collaborative Research Project
18 December 2006
Brisbane, Australia
The Brisbane-based e-Health Research Centre has been accepted as a partner of the AMIDA (Augmented Multi-party Interaction with Distant Access) Project, a consortium of 12 international research partners coordinated by the University of Edinburgh (UK) and the IDIAP Research Institute (Switzerland).
Commenced in October 2006 as an Integrated Project in the European Union's 6th Framework Programme with a project value in excess of €13M, AMIDA aims to design and implement technologies that recognise and overcome communication difficulties faced by co-located and distributed groups. AMIDA's long-term vision is of an automatic meeting assistant that can understand what is happening well enough to alert a remote participant when topics of interest come up, brief them on what has happened so far and help them cope with poor connections.
As a Project Partner, the e-Health Research Centre will conduct research into multimodal content analysis technologies to better support and evaluate meetings in the health sector. In response to the increasing emphasis on clinical networks in the delivery of health services, a particular focus will be on the evaluation of leadership and cohesion in clinical teams through automated measures and models of group dynamics.
"In the health sector, frequent meetings of medical professionals are necessary for ensuring quality of patient care and ongoing professional education," said Dr Anthony Maeder, the Centre's Research Director. "Such meetings are massively resource intensive, and are becoming more so as the range of medical specialisations increases in variety and depth, and as health care demand grows. We hope that the technologies being researched by AMIDA will enhance health care meetings in ways that have significant economic and social benefits."
One of the ways in which the e-Health Research Centre sees AMIDA potentially delivering ICT-based healthcare innovations is through a richly annotated multimedia recording of a health care meeting that can be browsed by a clinician who is only interested in periods where a particular patient or medical condition was discussed. Another application could be to evaluate leadership functions in clinical network teams through automated analyses of team dynamics.
The inclusion of the e-Health Research Centre in the AMIDA consortium allows for the application of world leading ICT research to the e-Health domain in an Australian context, as well as establishing strategic alliances between Australian e-Health researchers and world-leading overseas ICT and e-Health researchers. Significantly, it also provides Australian researchers with access to the European Science and Technology System within the 6th Framework Programme.
About the e-Health Research Centre
Established in 2003, the e-Health Research Centre is a leading national research facility in ICT for healthcare innovations. A joint venture between CSIRO and the Queensland Government, the e-Health Research Centre's Research Program aims to improve the quality and safety of healthcare for individuals and communities through an ICT research program focused on applied outcomes and active adoption by the health system.
About AMIDA
AMIDA is a European Union 6th Framework Program Integrated Project which aims to better understand, and build new support for, human communication at a distance. The ground-breaking research undertaken in AMIDA will span several traditionally separate disciplines, including:
- Qualitative human analysis and human factors
- Audio-video processing, including unconstrained speech recognition and natural scene analysis
- Multimodal structure and content analysis, including the modelling of individuals and groups, through the joint processing of multiple (multimodal) information channels (audio, visual, slides, handwriting, and white board activity)
- Human-Computer Interaction, application prototyping, evaluation, and system integration
For further information contact:
Gary Morgan
Chief Executive Officer
e-Health Research Centre
Mobile: 0412 177 780
Phone: 07 3024 1600
Email Gary Morgan
Media assistance:
Tom McGinness
CSIRO ICT Centre
Mobile: 0419 419 210
Phone: 02 9325 3227
Email Tom McGinness