Studies in Health Technology and Informatics

For observational studies, which are relevant especially for chronic conditions like chronic wounds, the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM) offers a standardized database schema. In this study an ETL process for the transition of wound related data was developed. After understanding the data in general and mapping the relevant codes to concepts available in OMOP, the ETL process was implemented. In a first step, a generic algorithm to convert data to a csv format was implemented in Java...

INTRODUCTION: In industrialised countries, one in ten patients suffers harm during hospitalization. Critical Incident Reporting Systems (CIRS) aim to minimize this by learning from errors and identifying potential risks. However, a lack of interoperability among the 16 CIRS in Germany hampers their effectiveness. METHODS: This study investigates reports' syntactic and semantic interoperability across seven different reporting systems. Syntactic interoperability was examined using WHO's Minimal Information Models (MIM), while semantic interoperability was evaluated with SNOMED concepts...

To provide clinical data in distributed research architectures, a fundamental challenge involves defining and distributing suitable metadata within Metadata Repositories. Especially for structured data, data elements need to be bound against suitable terminologies; otherwise, other systems will only be able to interpret the data with complex and error-prone manual involvement. As current Metadata Repository implementations lack support for querying externally defined terminologies in FHIR terminology servers, we propose an intermediate solution that uses appropriate annotations on metadata elements to allow run-time Terminology Services mediated queries of that metadata...

INTRODUCTION: This paper proposes an eye blink detection system that automatically detects eye blinks, which can be an indicator of fatigue or cognitive load, among others. As a key feature, the real-time capability of the system is being required to use it, for example, as a monitoring system for people in potentially critical situations (e.g., drivers or operators of heavy machinery). METHODS: The system uses the Viola-Jones algorithm for face detection and the median flow tracker to track the face in video sequences...

Clinical assessment of newly developed sensors is important for ensuring their validity. Comparing recordings of emerging electrocardiography (ECG) systems to a reference ECG system requires accurate synchronization of data from both devices. Current methods can be inefficient and prone to errors. To address this issue, three algorithms are presented to synchronize two ECG time series from different recording systems: Binned R-peak Correlation, R-R Interval Correlation, and Average R-peak Distance. These algorithms reduce ECG data to their cyclic features, mitigating inefficiencies and minimizing discrepancies between different recording systems...

Appropriate data models are essential for the systematic collection, aggregation, and integration of health data and for subsequent analysis. However, recommendations for modeling health data are often not publicly available within specific projects. Therefore, the project Zukunftslabor Gesundheit investigates recommendations for modeling. Expert interviews with five experts were conducted and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Based on the condensed categories "governance", "modeling" and "standards", the project team generated eight hypotheses for recommendations on health data modeling...

Today, many menstruating individuals track their cycles with mobile apps. These cycle apps use a lot of highly sensitive personal data. The goal of this study is to evaluate current cycle apps based on data privacy and medical criteria. First, a market analysis of currently available apps was conducted. Second, a scoring system was developed based on Digital Health application (Digitale Gesundheitsanwendungen, DiGA in German) guidelines, Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS), and other resources. A total of 18 apps were evaluated...

INTRODUCTION: While there is growing evidence of the benefits of assistive technologies little is known about their adoption under real circumstances and prevalence for everyday use. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this analysis therefore was (i) to investigate the adoption rates in the real world and (ii) to identify potential determinants of their adoption by care-dependant persons and family caregivers. METHODS: The present study is a secondary analysis based on the data set of the VdK study on home care arrangements (n=53,678)...

When processing written German language, it is helpful, to use the base form (or: lemma) of possibly inflected words, such as verbs, nouns or named entities. However, for German text from the (bio)medical domain, e.g., discharge letters, or entries stored in electronic medical or health records (EMR, EHR), difficulties exist in finding the correct lemma, as, for instance, the medical language has roots in Latin or Greek. In such cases, stemming techniques might provide inaccurate results for text written in German...

INTRODUCTION: Physical activity and health are closely linked. Therefore, monitoring movement behavior is of great interest e.g., to monitor a patient's physical state. Nowadays it is easy to record movement with a smartphone. The aim of this work was to develop a concept to detect trends based on personalized movement behavior recorded with a smartphone. METHODS: A first prototype with a control chart was designed. Since this approach did not prove suitable for analyzing activity data for trends in practice, a second prototype was subsequently developed with a statistical trend test (Mann-Kendall test (MK test))...

The task of automatically analyzing the textual content of documents faces a number of challenges in general but even more so when dealing with the medical domain. Here, we can't normally rely on specifically pre-trained NLP models or even, due to data privacy reasons, (massive) amounts of training material to generate said models. We, therefore, propose a method that utilizes general-purpose basic text analysis components and state-of-the-art transformer models to represent a corpus of documents as multiple graphs, wherein important conceptually related phrases from documents constitute the nodes and their semantic relation form the edges...

Representing knowledge in a comprehensible and maintainable way and transparently providing inferences thereof are important issues, especially in the context of applications related to artificial intelligence in medicine. This becomes even more obvious if the knowledge is dynamically growing and changing and when machine learning techniques are being involved. In this paper, we present an approach for representing knowledge about cancer therapies collected over two decades at St.-Johannes-Hospital in Dortmund, Germany...

INTRODUCTION: Contradiction is a relevant data quality indicator to evaluate the plausibility of interdependent health data items. However, while contradiction assessment is achieved using domain-established contradictory dependencies, recent studies have shown the necessity for additional requirements to reach conclusive contradiction findings. For example, the oral or rectal methods used in measuring the body temperature will influence the thresholds of fever definition. The availability of this required information as explicit data items must be guaranteed during study design...

The German Medical Informatics Initiative has agreed on a HL7 FHIR-based core data set as the common data model that all 37 university hospitals use for their patient's data. These data are stored locally at the site but are centrally queryable for researchers and accessible upon request. This infrastructure is currently under construction, and its functionality is being tested by so-called Projectathons. In the 6th Projectathon, a clinical hypothesis was formulated, executed in a multicenter scenario, and its results were analyzed...

INTRODUCTION: Prospective data collection in clinical trials is considered the gold standard of clinical research. Validating data entered in input fields in case report forms is unavoidable to maintain good data quality. Data quality checks include both the conformance of individual inputs to the specification of the data element, the detection of missing values, and the plausibility of the values entered. STATE-OF-THE-ART: Besides Libre-/OpenClinica there are many applications for capturing clinical data...

INTRODUCTION: Conducting research on human-computer interaction and information retrieval requires unobtrusive observations within existing network architectures. STATE OF THE ART: Most of the available tools are not suitable to be applied within restricted clinical systems. The specific requirements hinder analysis of the human factors in health sciences. CONCEPT: We identified extensions for popular web browsers as a suitable way to conduct studies in highly regulated environments...

INTRODUCTION: One possibility to support veterinarians in times of a vet shortage is by providing animal owners with a technical decision support for deciding whether their animal needs to be seen by a vet. As the first step in the user-centered development of such an mHealth application for equestrians, an analysis of the context of use was done. METHODS: The analysis was carried out by reviewing existing literature and conducting an online survey with 100 participants...

BACKGROUND: In Germany, patients are entitled to a medication plan. While the overview is useful, it does not contain explicit information on various potential adverse drug events (ADEs). Therefore, physicians must continue to seek information from various sources to ensure medication safety. OBJECTIVE: In this project a first functional prototype of a medication therapy tool was developed that focuses on visualizing and highlighting potential ADEs. A usability analysis about the tool's functionality, design and usability was conducted...

BACKGROUND: The number of emergency medical service (EMS) calls in Germany is continuously increasing. The initial assessment, the pre-hospital care and the choice of hospital for further care by the EMS influences the patient's outcome and are the basis for further care in hospital. However, the EMS does not receive any official feedback on its decisions. OBJECTIVES: This study evaluates the demand for a feedback system from the emergency department (ED) to the EMS, what it should contain, and how it could be integrated in the electronic clinical systems...

The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a reliable tool for usability measurement and evaluation. Since its original language is English, a translation is required before a target group can answer it in their native language. The challenge of translating questionnaires lies in the preservation of its original properties. Different versions of a German SUS have been proposed and are currently in use. Objective of this work is to find and compare available German translations. Four versions were found and compared in terms of the translation process and the exact wording of the translation...