Bridging two translation gaps: a new informatics research agenda for telemonitoring of chronic disease.

Objective: To propose a research agenda that addresses technological and other knowledge gaps in developing telemonitoring solutions for patients with chronic diseases, with particular focus on detecting deterioration early enough to intervene effectively.

Design: A mixed methods approach incorporating literature review, key informant, and focus group interviews to gain an in-depth, multidisciplinary understanding of current approaches, and a roadmapping process to synthesise a research agenda.

Results: Counter to intuition, the research agenda for early detection of deterioration in patients with chronic diseases is not only primarily about advances in sensor technology but also much more about the problems of clinical specification, translation, and interfacing.

Detecting deterioration in patients with chronic disease using telemonitoring: navigating the 'trough of disillusionment'.

Objectives: To examine the evidence base for telemonitoring designed for patients who have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart failure, and to assess whether telemonitoring fulfils the principles of monitoring and is ready for implementation into routine settings.

Design: Qualitative data collection using interviews and participation in a multi-path mapping process.

Participants: Twenty-six purposively selected informants completed semi-structured interviews and 24 individuals with expertise in the relevant clinical and informatics domains from academia, industry, policy and provider organizations and participated in a multi-path mapping workshop.

Simultaneous trend analysis for evaluating outcomes in patient-centred health monitoring services.

The research aim underpinning the Healthcare@Home (HH) information system described here was to enable 'near real time' risk analysis for disease early detection and prevention. To this end, we are implementing a family of prototype web services to 'push' or 'pull' individual's health-related data via an system of clinical hubs, mobile communication devices and/or dedicated home-based network computers. We are examining more efficient methods for ethical use of such data in timeline-based (i.

Alchemist multimodal workflows for diabetic retinopathy research, disease prevention and investigational drug discovery.

In this paper we present mechanisms for imaging and spectral data discovery, as applied to the early detection of pathologic mechanisms underlying diabetic retinopathy in research and clinical trial scenarios. We discuss the Alchemist framework, built using a generic peer-to-peer architecture, supporting distributed database queries and complex search algorithms based on workflow. The Alchemist is a domain-independent search mechanism that can be applied to search and data discovery scenarios in many areas.

Multigene family isoform profiling from blood cell lineages.

Background: Analysis of cell-selective gene expression for families of proteins of therapeutic interest is crucial when deducing the influence of genes upon complex traits and disease susceptibility. Presently, there is no convenient tool for examining isoform-selective expression for large gene families. A multigene isoform profiling strategy was developed and used to investigate the inwardly rectifying K+ (Kir) channel family in human leukocytes.