eHealth

Information and communications technology (ICT) is radically changing the way consumers access medical information and services, patients interact with their physicians, and physicians and other health care specialists interact with one another. The vision for TRLabs' eHealth research is to be recognized by the health sector and the ICT industry in Western Canada as a leader in ICT research and development applied to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and safety of health care delivery. TRLabs' creation, adoption, adaptation and application of innovative ICT within the health care sector through research and development projects focuses on key opportunities for multi-disciplinary collaboration between health care providers, ICT and heath care industries, and academic institutions on projects of mutual interest.

Clinical Networks

This area focuses on the design, analysis and testing of both wired and wireless networks for a clinical health care setting. Extensive analysis and modeling of current use, and projections of future use of networks is required given changing network use patterns as new networks become available. Medical networks will have critical applications running over them that fundamentally shift todays "best effort" IP-based network solutions toward more "bulletproof" and resource intensive requirements.

Telehealth

Telehealth refers to the use of ICT to provide clinical care to patients located at a distance. This includes: patient monitoring and provision of services directly to patients; and assisting the practice of medicine with access to shared information among health care professionals in a secure environment. This activity has significant synergy with TRLabs' home technologies research initiatve in that the core functions of home networks, such as home automation and monitoring, are central to the provision of health care within the home environment. TRLabs is also currently involved in research applying expertise in signal processing to develop automatic pre-screening of signals from monitoring devices, so that long-term data signals can be obtained and busy physicians and specialists can focus on the most salient features or segments of the signals collected.

Medical Informatics

Medical Informatics is broadly defined as the application of information technology to healthcare. This includes architectures for electronic medical records and other health information systems, messaging format and vocabulary standardization, decision support systems in health care, human interfaces such as portable devices for information access, and issues in data sharing such as privacy and data monitoring for health surveillance. TRLabs has been involved in research in security models for data access, performance analysis of patient location systems, and privacy preservation and data mining in health surveillance.

Medical Imaging, Simulation & Visualization

Medical imaging and image processing, and application of virtual and augmented reality and data interpretation and visualization offer significant prospects for enhancement of health care diagnostics and learning systems. TRLabs has been involved in research in image construction using PET (Positron Emission Tomography) data and has also conducted several health related demonstration projects using mobile agents and distributed visualization technologies.