CARENET

Carenet project is developing and populating an open infrastructure facilitating cooperation on research, development and education in the e-health area. It focuses on patient pathways rather than medical disciplines and - initiated by the Karolinska Living Lab in Stockholm - is now including international partners all over the globe. The infrastructure includes research and education facilities as well as dedicated extensions to reach rural health centres, out-patients and mobile users.

Main objective:
The domain of the project is on e-health. The aim of this project is an open infrastructure facilitating cooperation on research, development and education in the e-health area, focused on patient pathways rather than medical disciplines. It was initiated by the Karolinska Living Lab in Stockholm and is growing organically to include international partners all over the globe. The infrastructure is an overlay of the dedicated research and education network infrastructure but also includes dedicated extensions to reach rural health centers, out-patients and mobile users.

Main activities:
The initial focus is on two patient pathways:
1.    neonatal care of prematurely born babies;
2.    severe upper abdominal diseases involving gastric surgery.
The major project activities so far include:
Remote neonatal and postoperative care to make more patients feel secure being cared remotely by providing continuous monitoring and making expert competence available via video conferencing.
Preoperative surgical planning sessions via HD video conferencing while sharing high-resolution medical images to reach consensus decisions among different medical experts about treatment programs.

Doctors and other healthcare workers, medical and technical students, patients, politicians responsible for the health-care systems

•    The infrastructure is implemented as an overlay on top of the dedicated research and education network infrastructure with extensions specific for each node, either to reach health-care units, patients or other users that are not connected to the REN or to facilitate experiments with new technical solutions that cannot be accommodated in the REN.
•    In general, the ICT systems used in Carenet include high-performance, low-effect and low-cost network elements, such as routers and switches, network servers and high-definition video clients, all based on open source software and selected off-the shelf hardware components. The extensions are mostly based on optical fibre or, wherever this is not available, wireless links.