General Aim
Accident & emergency informatics (A&EI) is a novel and trans-disciplinary science of systematic collecting and managing medical data (e.g., electronic health records) as well as sensor data from the human environment (e.g., event data recorder such as acceleration sensors in the vehicle), their syntactic and semantic integration and their analytics, in order to forecast, prevent, or lower the impact of such events on the subject.
Therefore, the core mission of A&EI is saving lives – on the one hand by combining and jointly analyzing medical and non-medical data, and on the other hand by involving decision-makers, actors, and stakeholders from politics, infrastructure and health management, and industry.
Focus of Research
A&EI research is focused on the conception (syntactic and semantic interoperability), implementation (at least on the prototype level), and operation (at least as a field experiment) of sensor-enriched medical information systems. Our research is addressing the following tasks:
- Data collection: Collecting sensor-based event data that is related to accidents and medical emergencies must be captured in real-time. Relevant data can be recorded with fixed sensors in the living space, in a vehicle, or with sensors worn on or even inside the human body. Today’s vehicles are already equipped with a variety of sensors (e.g., temperature, rain, global position, seat belt status, airbags, breaks, and other assistance systems) but other living spaces (e.g., homes) need enrichment with according sensors.
- Data management: Accident and emergency data have to be stored in appropriate registries. The design and implementation of such data repositories providing syntactic and semantic interoperability as well as satisfying data privacy and security requirements are important requirements and considered as the key expertise of PLRI.
- Data integration: Linking event-related data to medical data will yield increased knowledge of accidents and emergencies. Location and time-based identifiers are needed to bridge the different registries. Such automatically generated identifiers need appropriate hashing and integration in existing data systems.
- Data analytics: In order to predict accident and emergency situations, to take a specific action, or to lower their impact on humans, the merged data have to be analyzed. Therefore, A&EI involves investigating accidents and emergencies through state-of-the-art methods of data science and analytics targeting towards automatic alarming systems that actually save lives.
Event Data Recorder
A&EI-relevant information systems and data recorders are related to a stack of application areas:
- Environment (e.g., smart cities)
- Living space (e.g., smart homes)
- Vehicle (e.g., smart cars)
- On-body (e.g., smart wearables)
- In-body (e.g., smart implants)
