SYSTEM TO TRACK HOSPITAL ICU HYGIENE

by Karen Nugent, NEWS Telegram.com

A doctor enters a hospital room to examine a patient, but neglects to wash her hands. A special badge on her lab coat turns a deep shade of red as wireless computer components in the door, the soap dispenser and near the bed immediately relay information about the unwashed hands.

The doctor is busted.

The streaming data analysis is part of a two-year pilot partnership between the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Elke Rundensteiner, a professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who is building the underlying technology with the help of several WPI students.

The transmission of bacteria in health care settings is an ongoing public health problem often caused by neglecting good hygiene.

The UMass Medical School pilot program will begin within a month, using patient rooms in intensive care units. Ms. Rundensteiner said the system will be used to monitor health care workers, including doctors, nurses and technicians, who would voluntarily wear the badges. Computer hardware attached to patient room doors, soap and mask dispensers, and near patient beds will continuously watch for missed hand washings. When they’re detected, the system will turn a badge red, plus send instant results to nurses’ stations and to multiple computers, including those at WPI. ……

The technology, she said, is valuable in situations that cannot be planned in advance, such as massive evacuations during natural disasters when information is streaming in to authorities from thousands of cell phones and other handheld electronic devices.  ….

To provide such instant data, she borrows a traditional model called online data analytical processing, which is usually used with static, offline data warehouses after it has been collected. Ms. Rundensteiner’s system immediately extracts complex patterns from data streams using what she calls “real time, complex event-stream analytics.”

“You can track every click, and individual events and messages, to get real-time patterns,” she said.

The process involves aggregating thousands of events (computer clicks) into higher-level events by continually summarizing the event stream to extract the essence. It saves time, storage space, electricity and, possibly, lives. …. Report

DCL: Sounds like she’s reinventing CEP. There’s an event abstraction hierarchy in there somewhere. Good luck to her!