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AIMES project started the 1st of May of 2008 and will end the 31st of October 2010. The Project is aimed at developing a service infrastructure for the overall technical hospital facilities. New tools for management, distributed condition monitoring and diagnosis of fix and mobile medical equipment will be integrated into the appropriate communication infrastructure.
You can find complete information about the project in the following sections:
- Overview
- Goals
- Development
- Architecture
- Use cases
- Results
- AIMES Consortium
- News
Nowadays, most European enterprises, specifically manufacturers of medical equipment, are competitors to big enterprises all over the world. Thus, to keep their market sales expectations within the global market, they have to work harder to make their products meet the quality and prices which get the acceptance of the consumers and fulfil their needs. This situation even applies to classical service providers, offering the high quality services for medical equipment on the international market.
- Furthermore, the service business of medical equipment manufacturers has become more complex, driven by the combination and integration of different new technologies, extensive use of software applications and networks applied to specific customer‘s solutions.
Thus, it is the intention of this project to develop a service infrastructure for the overall technical hospital facilities, covering the integration of management tools into appropriate communication infrastructure, distributed condition monitoring, diagnosis and remote access to medical equipment, management and tracking of mobile medical equipment using RFID as well as dynamic management of nomadic service personnel.
This shall be reached through the application of up to date research results and working on related computer, mathematics and network science domains like:
- Service Oriented Architecture—SOA as a basic technology for the service infrastructure network.
- Secure and safe mobile communication between mobile equipment, basic service infrastructure and mobile personnel.
- Agent technology e.g. for equipment monitoring and diagnosis.
- Smart items like RFID intended for overall facility management and equipment life cycle support and tracking.
- Data mining algorithms over the samples gathered from the equipments in order to make predictions of behaviour based on patterns identification after sample processes, promoting preventive actions before system‘s faults.
- Characterization techniques (dynamic profiling) to define specific behaviour for every type of equipment and model.
The goal of AIMES is to develop a service infrastructure for hospital technical facilities. It covers the integration of management tools into appropriate communications infrastructures, distributed condition monitoring, diagnosis and remote access to medical equipment. AIMES is also concerned with the management and tracking of mobile medical equipment using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology as well as a dynamic management of nomadic service personnel.
- Major Visible Expected Results
- General Goal
It is the intention of AIMES project to define the appropriate support, which will allow adapting the strategies for facilities and service management to legal requirements, patients overall sufficiency and to technical and economic demands. The obtained solution should be exploitable in hospital's environment (shall integrate the existent equipment, support mobile applications and fit the level of skills of the personnel) and provide contributions to standards.
The first visible result will be advanced models, concepts and strategies of facility and service management supported by the use of smart components like RFID or electronic equipment memory enabling equipment tracking and tracing, condition monitoring and mobile applications within hospitals executed on a suitable platform. The platform will instantiate a service oriented architecture (SOA) enabling medical equipment for reporting failures and abnormal situations. Those events will be generated by different types of agents following business process roles.
The second visible result will be to prototype implementations of the concepts and strategies developed. This will be the basis for developments of innovative software and hardware components to become market in short time after the project termination. Device manufacturers will benefit from the prototype implementations while taking the experience to improve remote service capabilities of their products (medical equipment). Software tool manufacturers will also be able to improve their tool capabilities.
The third visible result will be a real life demonstrator of the project achievements in a hospital environment (service platform, equipment tracking, facility management, condition monitoring and scheduling of mobile service personnel – all supported by appropriate tools) supporting optimized business cases.
High availability of medical equipment becomes a basic requirement for cost and patient‘s satisfactory reasons. Networking of equipment as a basis for automatic alert messaging and remote diagnosis could contribute to increase availability and efficiency of equipment use. It is a precondition for the reduction of personnel operation and interpretation of failures.
Today‘s medical equipment is made on high technical standards and advanced technologies. This is corresponding to high fixed and current costs. Nevertheless resources are not used as efficient as it would be appropriate or even possible. Although patient related data are automatically put to the hospitals databases, equipment related data remain, due to several reasons (like lack of standard interfaces, hiding vendor specific data, security constraints, etc.) behind the border of the equipment interfaces.
The current situation limits the capabilities of in-house maintenance personnel as well as the efficiency of external service providers (equipment manufacturer, third parties). This results in high downtimes of the equipment and consecutively in high costs paid by public and private medical insurance and finally by the patients.
Technical hospital personnel is responsible for servicing and maintaining (first level support) different equipment (medical or from other domains like heating/cooling and ventilation (HVAC), automated transportation, IT related equipment, emergency energy provision, etc.). Alert messaging and scheduling of service and maintenance activities today is a time consuming and error prone personnel process.
Remote access to hospital equipment for service and maintenance reasons is an exception considering the number of installations, although it would be possible from the technical point of view. This is due to security doubts, lack of standards for interfaces, lack of appropriate business models, or personnel objection.
To overcome this situation, AIMES targets the following objectives:
- Automatic scalable alert messaging appropriate to the equipment status and business models.
- Clinic technicians and authorized personnel (manufacturer, third parties) shall get transparent, but limited access to context-aware information regarding medical equipment.
- Online predictive maintenance solutions for medical equipment (hosted within the hospital or at equipment specialists).
- Optimized cooperation between medical personnel, technicians of hospitals and the service centres (equipment vendors and third-parties).
- Dynamic management and data provision for service personnel, planning of operations, scheduling of medical (patient related) and technical services (internal and external).
- Optimize the use of equipment and personnel by allocating the right and nearer equipment (e.g. using RFID input) to the right task.
- Optimized equipment information management and information re-use in various applications across different life cycle phases of the equipment.
- Tracking of mobile equipment within a clinic.
Pending...
The Study Logic‘s Main Phases
The work covered by AIMES is organized in the following directions:
- Logistics management of medical equipment (inventory, tracking, dynamic scheduling, etc.) supported by appropriate tools and RFID based on overall equipment models.
- Maintenance of medical equipment (condition monitoring, diagnosis, prediction, etc.) supported by suitable algorithms.
- Service management (planning of maintenance interventions, co-ordination of therapies with equipment use, etc.) supported by co-operating tools.
- Adaptable user interfaces depending on personnel tasks.
- Development and experimentation of a suitable infrastructure (networking of equipment, tools and personnel in a mobile and secure environment, networking with external equipment manufacturers and service partners, etc.) to enable the above applications.
Project work packages
AIMES project is split up into seven work packages which comprise all tasks to be carried out during the project. AIMES work packages are the following ones:
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- Management of equipment.
- Availability of equipment/resources and support of critical healthcare workflows.
- Equipment capabilities regarding support of maintenance functions and interfaces to access related functions and data exploiting service approach.
- Technical service infrastructures.
- Business models and workflow to operate typical to the domain of hospitals
The main goal of this work package is to identify typical requirement targeting:
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This work package is dedicated to management / logistics of medical equipment (but not limited to) during that part of the product life cycle it resides within the hospital or clinic. This means, starting with the inventory of individual equipment, covering tracking equipment position and tracing equipment life cycle information, optimizing its use and service intervals and finally using life cycle information to plan and decide about future investments. To be able to do this systematically, tool support strongly requires overall equipment modeling. While doing equipment modeling one has to take care about distributed data hosting, even on smart items, and system wide data consistency.
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The goal of this work package is to conduct situation assessment, fault diagnosis, leading to alarm management systems that provide decision making to support maintenance operations. The planning and scheduling of the required activities involved in the operation are also contemplated. |
The objective of WP 4 is to design the overall architecture of AIMES that will support service and facility management activities. This is a key work package in which major infrastructure components and information protocols will be defined. Within this WP has to be defined how the different services will collaborate and how it will be able to deploy new applications supported by the AIMES architecture. One part of this work package is to investigate former and current projects on integration platforms and, if possible, to take advantage from available results of those projects. |
The objectives of this work package are to compose systems based on individual components developed in the previous WPs, to test technical usefulness of the components and the overall system developed during the project and to communicate the project development work and results of the user trials.
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The implementation of project‘s dissemination strategy is based on 5 basic axes:
Exploitation activities are mainly driven by the individual activities planned by the project partners. Where applicable and beneficial, partners will start joint exploitation activities |
This work package concentrates all the actions which contribute to a good and harmonised project implementation. Major actions are under the responsibility of the co-ordinating partner and concern the organisation of day-to-day project operation. These actions concern contacts with ITEA 2 office, information distribution among project partners, monitoring and synchronisation of work progress across the project. Management actions include also preparation and organisation of periodic and less frequent project events like project workshops, task meetings, co-ordination committee meetings and review meetings with National and international authorities. The management work package also includes all resources needed to organise a regular, efficient reporting on project progress. The reports are based on data prepared by all project partners and work package leaders and collected by the project leader |
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A use case is a description of a system's behaviour. It describes how actors interoperate to achieve one or more goals. Thus it includes descriptions of context information, goals, triggers, actors, action sequences, pre- and post-conditions. We want to identify goal oriented workflows. We want to identify the actors in these workflows, who exchange data as well. Furthermore we like to identify information which has to be transferred between actors. These include machine-machine, machine-human and human-human information exchanges. We have the purpose for a use case analysis for facility management as we like to know how different partners see the application area of a facility management in detail. So, in this section we give a brief description of workflows as they are typically found in clinical environments
A specific database for medical equipment assists the maintenance management, schedules safety checks and measurement controls. Then, we show typical workflow studied in this project:
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The AIMES project will define the appropriate support to allow the adaptation of strategies for hospital facilities and service management to legal requirements, patient needs, and technical and economic demands. The solution obtained should be exploitable in hospital environments and provide contributions to standards.
Four main results are foreseen in AIMES project:
- Creation of advanced models, concepts and strategies for facility and service management, leveraging use of smart components such as RFID or electronic equipment memory. This enables equipment tracking and tracing, condition monitoring and mobile applications within hospitals executed on a suitable —future — platform. The platform will be based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) enabling medical equipment to report failures and abnormal situations. Such events will be generated by different types of agents following business-process roles.
- Prototype implementations for the specified concepts and strategies that will benefit device manufacturers and improve remote service capabilities of their products. Software tool manufacturers will also be able to improve their tools‘ capabilities.
- A real-life demonstrator of project achievements in a hospital environment –service platform, equipment tracking, facility management, condition monitoring and scheduling of mobile service personnel, all supported by appropriate tools –sustaining optimised business cases.
- Planned publication and participation in international conferences and workshops.
A preliminary market analysis identifies several user groups potentially benefiting from the expected project results:
- Operators of medical equipment and hospitals.
- Manufacturers of medical equipment.
- Facility and service management software manufacturers.
- Service providers.
- RFID and other infrastructure equipment manufacturers.
- Management and control staff within facilities using medical equipment.
The following companies are part of the AIMES Project Consortium. You can view below their participation in the project:
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http://www.draeger-medical.com/
Dräger Medical develops, manufactures and sells innovative products, services and integrated solutions for acute patient care and home care. The company's global portfolio encompasses complete solutions for the point of care throughout the patient care process - in all care areas from emergency care, perioperative care to critical care, perinatal care and home care.
Dräger was founded in 1889 in Lübeck, Germany. Effective July 1, 2003, Dräger Medical AG & Co.KG is a 75:25 Joint Venture company between Drägerwerk AG and Siemens AG Nowadays the company is represented in over 190 countries around the world with subsidiaries in some 40 countries. Engineering and manufacturing is located in the USA, Europe and China.
Dräger Medical employs more than 6.000 people worldwide. Out of the turnover of 1.2 Billion € in 2006 an amount of 7% are invested in R&D.
Dräger Medical is the largest division of Drägerwerk AG, contributing some 70 percent of total sales. Drägerwerk AG is listed in the German TecDAX and is traded on the German stock exchanges.
As a selling and system partner of the Loy & Hutz AG from Freiburg we offer our customers a comprehensive service package for the software products of the Loy & Hutz AG (Software for Maintenance and Facility Management). Product consultation, project completion and training courses/seminars are only a few of our authorities, by which you profit from our experiences of many years. Our business philosophy consists of accompanying you on a long-term basis during the conversion of an efficient and in itself compatible infrastructure in Maintenance and Facility Management. We have over 20 employees, which are mainly graduated engineers in medical technology, software development and economics.
FEIG was founded in 1970 and has now about 160 employees. The main business activities include RFID hard- and software, control equipment for industrial doors and induction loop detectors.
The annual turnover is about 24 Mill. Euro. FEIG‘s products are used on the international market. The company has representatives in most of the European countries.
FEIG develops and manufactures RFID readers and antennas. As an OEM supplier, the company delivers only system integrators and resellers. The company offers components within the range of 125 kHz (access control), 13.56 MHz (eDocument, Ticketing, logistics etc.) and UHF (EPC Gen2 compatible readers for retail, logistics etc.). The R&D department comprises 25 development engineers. A complete laboratory equipment is available to do high sophisticated R&D on RFID products for the frequency ranges <135 kHz, 13.56 MHz and UHF (860-960 MHz).
FEIG is an active member of standardisation committees e.g. EPC, ISO, and DIN.
The "Institut für Automation und Kommunikation" (ifak), founded in 1991, is a non-profit research institute with 58 employees, mainly graduated engineers, partly holding a PhD or working as University Professors, and in addition a number of guest scientists, students in practical training and diploma thesis students. The main activities of ifak aim at applied research in the field of automation and communication technologies.
One major subject ifak is working on, is the investigation of growing information technologies as well as of data handling methods regarding their usefulness for maintenance and general facility/asset management purposes. The AIMES project will support these investigations. ifak is working in several maintenance related projects. Here requirements specification, system design and software/system engineering are in the focus of ifak work. ifak was one of the technology driving partners and leader of the German part of the ITEA PROTEUS project.
Employees of ifak are active members of international, European and national standardization committees
Indra is the leading Spanish Information Technologies and Defense Systems Company, with presence in more than 80 countries with local offices in more than 30.
Indra's Vision is to be an innovative, knowledge-based company in all relations with our internal and external stakeholders (shareholders, employees, customers, etc.) and with the institutions that cultivate and develop those values, and the communities where we operate.
The vision of knowledge and innovation is people-oriented, as the protagonists are the people who research, learn, teach and innovate to create solutions and services, as well as ways of doing things and ways of thinking
The R&D division of the Networks and Communications Business Unit, comes from the specialization born in this area, with a comprehensive offer of products and services, offered for over 15 years. From the R&D division, we can offer projects of System Integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).
For over 5 years, the R&D&I activities have focused in the coordination and participation in national and European projects, as well as the collaboration in relevant forums and events of the sector, publication of articles, conferences, etc.
Within the experience obtained in this field, we can highlight the participation in several European projects in the FP6 Programme (eg. EuQoS, ENABLED, MULTINET, etc), the coordination of VISUAL (V PM) project, and DESYME (CELTIC-EUREKA), and the participation in the EUREKA programme (SHOPS, IMAGES, etc).
It is also worth mentioning the labour of the R&D department of the Network division of INDRA in a great number of projects in the Spanish programme “PROFIT” (over 15 projects), and the leading of a great amount of projects in the Galician regional programme PGIDIT (over 5 projects). On the other hand, it participates in several technological platforms (both Spanish and European), and is a member of the Organizer Committee in the most renowned R+D event in Spain, the R+D Telecom.
Created in 1988, RGB Medical Devices (www.rgb-medical.com) is a SME specialised in the development and manufacturing of Vital Signs Monitors for hospital use. RGB manufactures patient monitoring equipment including ECG, pulse oximetry, non-invasive blood pressure, invasive blood pressure and temperature. It has experience in IT technology for the development of telemedicine and telecare systems with CEN contribution to open platform solutions for middleware communication for medical data interoperability and medical devices networking
Equipment maintenance is part of the current business core, as a result of over 1000 installations in more than 30 countries. RGB Medical Devices, as technology supplier, is interested to move into technical service business, in particular using IT for medical and technical data transmission and on line processing through web applications. The project is in line with the company‘s core business. RGB Medical Devices intends to use the results of AIMES as an excellent case study, exchange of ideas and support to incorporate new exploitation capabilities.
SBSK GmbH was established in 1991 in a move to outsource the IT-department of Landtechnik Schönebeck GmbH, a vendor of agricultural machines. SBSK is now a fully independent system integrator and service provider. Our competences are based in the areas of reliable IT as well as secure networking and communications. Our headquarters are in Schönebeck.
We maintain numerous qualifications in the areas of system operators (Microsoft, Linux, Novell ...), networking (Cisco, HP, Enterasys, Funkwerk…) and security (BSI Grundschutz Auditor, ISO27001).
We provide a wide range services spanning from network planning and security consulting via application programming and adapting to operations support, managed services and emergency support services 24 hours, 365 days a year. We can react immediately with established techniques of distant-diagnosis, problem solving and service using modern communication technology.
Our headquarters are equipped with a laboratory containing a wide variety of communication components for simulating customer problems and for educational purposes. We are also running a networking competence group.
Siemens, headquartered in Berlin and Munich, is one of the world‘s largest electrical engineering and electronics companies and holds leading market positions in all its business areas.
In fiscal 2006 (ended September 30), the company employed approximately 475,000 people and posted sales of €87.325 billion from continuing operations. Net income for the year totaled €3.033 billion. Siemens generates more than 80 percent of its sales outside Germany. Siemens has a strong international presence, with operations in over 190 countries and manufacturing facilities at about 290 locations worldwide.
The company‘s business portfolio is focused on six key areas: Information and Communications, Automation and Control, Power, Transportation, Medical and Lighting. Global business operations at Siemens are the responsibility of 13 Groups, including Siemens Financial Services and Siemens Real Estate. In addition, Siemens is also a partner in joint venture, with Bosch in the household appliances sector (BSH Bosch-Siemens Hausgeräte) and with Fujitsu in computer systems (Fujitsu Siemens Computers).
In fiscal 2006, Siemens invested €5.7 billion in research and development, including customer-specific activities to stay at the forefront of technological progress. Last fiscal year, Siemens researchers and developers turned out around 10,400 inventions, a 17% increase, and applied for patents for about 6,200 of them. The company is the largest patent applicant in Germany, in second place in Europe and among the top ten in the United States. Most of Siemens’ approximately 49,000 researchers and developers are working on software projects, making the company one of the world‘s largest software houses. Siemens continues to concentrate on expanding the range of services, solutions and systems that complement its product portfolio.
Siemens participates in AIMES with Siemens Corporate Research and Technology (CT) and Siemens Medical (Med):
- Siemens CT accounts for about five percent of Siemens R&D expenditures. Worldwide, more than 1,900 researchers and developers work at 12 facilities to develop key technologies and versatile multiple-impact technologies that can be used in several Groups. More than 40 departments with a total of 150 competence centers successfully transfer this knowledge into the operating Groups in numerous contracted projects. Staying in close and frequent contact with day—to—day operations helps CT follow trends and recognize which fields of technology will be relevant to the Groups over the intermediate and long term. The CT Software and Engineering division provides the Groups with comprehensive support regarding the selection and deployment of software, in implementing innovative products as well as through studies, reviews and consulting services.
Siemens CT participates in the project with its competence in SW architecture and platforms, in particular for SW and service management, and its capability to integrate the different Siemens groups. Moreover, CT has extensive competence in leading national and collaborative research projects.
- Siemens Med history started in the year 1877 when Erwin Moritz Reiniger began to manufacture electro medical devices in Erlangen. Today Med develops, manufactures and distributes diagnostic and therapeutic systems for e.g. computer tomography, magnet resonance tomography, molecular imaging, ultrasound, radiation therapy, in vitro diagnostic, hearing aid and IT solutions for clinical and administrative issues. Med is the first healthcare supplier to provide a full range of diagnostic procedures featuring all key in—vivo and in—vitro technologies. In addition Med provides most innovative technical maintenance and consulting services.
The Med division is part of the Siemens AG and located in Erlangen. In the fiscal year 2006 8.227 Mio Euro Sales were achieved and more than 33.000 people employed.
Med is suited for this project because of its leadership in providing pro-active services, based on customized basic IT-technology (Siemens Remote Services) and proven outcomes of more than 2.500 pro-actively monitored systems within the European time-zone. Med operates particular service centres for pro-active services
Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo is a large R&D company totally owned by Telefónica S.A and operational since 1988, created to fulfil its Research and Development requirements with more excellence and profitability and to contribute to Telefónica Group competitiveness through technological innovation. Over the last years, the line of work of Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo has evolved to conform to the objective of becoming a service creation lab. This objective is driven by the emergence of interactive multimedia services, which are increasingly becoming a mayor force in the telecommunications market.
All the activities in Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo are carried out conforming to an in house methodology, supported with tools, which has been awarded an ISO 9001 Certification since 1994, ISO 14001 Certification since 1998 and a large amount of prices to innovation and excellence.
Over the last years, the line of work of T I+D has evolved to conform to the objective of becoming a service creation lab. This objective is driven by the emergence of interactive multimedia services, which are increasingly becoming a mayor force in the telecommunications market. Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo employs over 1200 people, 93% of them hold a University degree.
Nowadays, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo is the most important private company in Spain devoted to R&D and very active in the following major areas:
Services creation, related to the broadband, ADSL, intelligent network, data communications, narrow band ISDN, mobile communications, speech technology, multimedia services, and public use telecommunications, Network and services management, both fixed and mobile, using solutions based on the latest standards and Network innovation, with the purpose of supporting Telefónica in its effort to offer the widest possible range of services.
The company has also depth expertise in formal methods, object oriented design and programming systems, software engineering tools, real time systems, data bases and knowledge bases, A.I. tool kits, knowledge representation and reasoning, man machine interface, and software tools for network simulation. The company has a computer centre, a micro software development tools group, and special laboratories, such as an optical transmission one, Smart Home one, Human Factors, or a video services laboratory.
Telefónica I+D is the first software provider for Telefónica Group and nowadays play a strategic paper in R&D&I tasks inside the global telecommunications group.
The eXiT research group at the University of Girona develops an active research in the field of process supervision with emphasis in the integration of methods and techniques to assess process behaviour from measurements and experience reuse based on the following main points: Case-Based Diagnosis, Multivariate statistical process control, qualitative representation of trends, knowledge discovering in data bases for situation assessment. Recent research has focussed on the distributed approach of the techniques, including multi-agent architectures and the research concerns topics on the boundary between computer science and economics for dealing with resource allocation. The expertise of eXiT group on these software technologies proves its research capabilities regarding the development of prediction, monitoring, diagnosing and planning tools, as well as distributed architectures based on agent technologies and coordination mechanisms based on economic models.
The eXit group has participated in the IST FP 6th (CHEM project), as well as the Agentlink Network of Excellence and the Agenticites initiative (from which some of its members were finalist of the European Descartes Prize). At the national level, they are currently collaborating in different national founding projects that include scheduling in distributed environments in transport domains, supervision in energy distribution networks and data trend analysis in waste water treatment plants. In all the projects they are collaborating with different kind of industries and companies.
http://www.med.uni-magdeburg.de
The University hospital in Magdeburg (Germany) is a hospital in the highest degree of medical care and provides high level medical services for about 2.000.000 inhabitants in Middle Germany. The institution has 1.136 hospital beds and takes care of 44.624 patients per year. Additional the ambulances take care of 257.327 outpatients. The hospital operates about 20.000 medical devices. This represents an investment volume of 140 million Euros. Annual 6.600 maintenance events there performed by in-house technicians and 6.500 maintenance events there performed by external service providers. The in-house service is performed by a service centre with 20 employees.
The university hospital provides expertise as provider of medical services and also as operating company for medical equipment.
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The Spanish Consortium of AIMES project with ITEA2 code (ip07017) and AVANZA code TSI-020400-2008-047 has been cofunded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade into de National Plan of Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation 2008-2011
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The AIMES project is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade in the context of the National Plan of Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation 2008-2011 ( AVANZA code TSI-020400-2008-047 ) and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (support code 01ISO8001E) within the EU Programm ITEA2
