The Department of Telematics & Intelligent Health Systems provides solutions for electronic communication in health care, personal care and the networked medical research.

The telematics support of workflows and processes in health care comes with greater significance. The emergence of new healthcare models such as integrated disease management programs requires collaboration among health professionals, the use of electronic communication and a consistent cross-facility treatment documentation. Therefore, the department Telematics & Inrelligent Health Systems provides the ICT infrastructure. Its patented e-health solution Padok® with its communications services is used by the German association of CHI physicians under the name D2D nationwide as its e-health platform. More than 7,000 hospitals and clinics are using the services of D2D. The leading system houses have adopted the D2D platform in their practice computer systems and hospital information systems for secure, cross-facility document exchange. Future versions of D2D will support the new electronic health professional card and the infrastructure of the emerging German e-health platform for the public health system.

Against the background of demographic change, the department develops personal health systems and intelligent assistants for the elderly and chronically ill persons. Its homecare- and telemedicine platform TOPCARE was used in many telemedicine pilots in Europe and America. The focus of our R&D efforts are solutions for personalized and preventive medicine such as predictive health assessment systems. In addition, the department realises the vision of intelligent, ad hoc networking, plug and play-enabled medical devices and sensors, for which it provides the middleware framework Semantic Medical Device Space for semantic interoperability and for self-learning.

For the networked clinical research the department develops the electronic infrastructure and respective tools. Examples are its GRID-enabled, ontology-based management system for multicenter clinical trials ObTIMa, which facilitates the integration of study data, or eurocryoDB, an innovative sample logistics system for biobanks.

In our department, we have developed a SOA based middleware infrastructure using Semantic Web and Semantic Web Service (SWS) technologies, named Semantic Medical Devices Space (SMDS), which is used to develop the next generation Ambient Intelligent (AmI) medical devices/sensors, having the capabilities to semantically discover the desired medical devices/sensors based on their physical and/or functional characteristics, and use their service(s) for exchanging the measurement results and producing a higher level of interpretation of these results. SMDS is enriched with our own developed Semantic Medical Devices Discovery Protocol (SMDDP) and an integrated micro OWL Description Logic (DL) Reasoning System (µOR), which provides semantic discovery, knowledge querying, knowledge consistency checking and inference capabilities on each AmI medical device/sensor.