Studies in health technology and informatics
-
Successful applications of haptic displays are limited to tool-based interfaces that simulate haptic effects on surgical and other medical instruments. However, no satisfactory haptic display exist so far, that enable the simulation of high fidelity palpation of human tissue or body segments. Existing approaches developed for medical training fail due to unrealistic haptic effects, time-consuming donning and doffing, and inconvenient use (e.g., mechatronic tactile and kinesthetic displays) or due to restricted function and adjustability (e.g., passive mannequins). ⋯ The new haptic display has been verified with a setup developed for the training of functional joint evaluation after knee injuries. Compared to classical approaches, this display is convenient to use, provides realistic tactile properties and can be partly adjusted to different system properties (e.g. pathological joint properties). This kind of new interface can be applied to many different medical applications, where the clinician directly touches human limbs or tissue, such as in obstetrics, reanimation, organ palpation, etc.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2002
The incidence of idiopathic scoliosis in Greece--analyais of domestic school screening programs.
The aim of the study is the documentation of the national incidence of idiopathic scoliosis (IS) based on the School Screening programs performed at the various geographical departments of the country, and the estimation of the probable number of children who will need to be conservatively or surgically treated. ⋯ From data of 1998 national census, the population of children aged 8 to 14 years old was approximately 751000. With the above -mentioned datum and with a national mean scoliosis incidence of 2.9%, (Cobb angle > or = 10 degrees), 21781 children will be found with scoliosis. 980 will need conservative treatment using a brace while 41 children will need surgical treatment.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2001
Design of a consumer health record for supporting the patient-centered management of chronic diseases.
This paper describes and discusses the design and usage of a shareable consumer health record system to investigate whether these systems can assist in the management of chronic diseases. This web-based system that can be used both by care providers and patients contains medical and patient information, provides access to websites that contain quality information, provides guideline-based advice, allows discussion between patients and allows us to interrogate both patients and care providers on a regular basis in order to get a good impression of the utility of such a consumer record for both chronic patients and the physicians and nurses. A health record system that was developed for the area of Diabetes is presented as an example.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2001
Sharable computer-based clinical practice guidelines: rationale, obstacles, approaches, and prospects.
Clinical practice guideline automation at the point of care is of growing interest, yet most guidelines are authored in unstructured narrative form. Computer-based execution depends on a formal structured representation, and also faces a number of other challenges at all stages of the guideline lifecycle: modeling, authoring, dissemination, implementation, and update. This is because of the multiplicity of conceptual models, authoring tools, authoring approaches, intended applications, implementation platforms, and local interface requirements and operational constraints. ⋯ Because of limitations in what can be done by a single team with finite resources, however, and the variety of additional perspectives that need to be accommodated, the InterMed team has determined that further development of a shared representation would be best served as an open process in which the world community is engaged. Under the auspices of the HL7 Decision Support Technical Committee, a GLIF Special Interest Group has been established, which is intended to be a forum for collaborative refinement and extension of a standard representation that can support the needs of the guideline lifecycle. Significant areas for future work will need to include demonstrations of effective means for incorporating guide-lines at point of care, reconciliation of functional requirements of different models and identification of those most important for supporting practical implementation, im-proved means for authoring and management of complexity, and methods for automatically analyzing and validating syntax, semantics, and logical consistency of guidelines.