Publications

This page contains background information on the research and development (R&D) behind Cetrea's technology and solutions. This research has been published in leading international peer-reviewed conferences and journal.

Medical Technology Assessment (MTA)

The Medical Technology Assessment Unit in the Region Midt of Denmark has made a Medical Technology Assessment of Cetrea Surgical, which concludes that "after iHospital was deployed at the regional hospital of Horsens, there has been a significant and measurable increase of the utility of the ORs." The report is in Danish and is available as:

  • LG Jensen, L Ehlers, M Bech, TR Hansen, JT Lauridsen, M Kjølby. Medicinsk teknologivurdering af Det Interaktive Hospital (iHospital). MTV og Sundhedstjenesteforskning Center for Folkesundhed Region Midtjylland, Århus: 2009. [pdf]

Clinical Evaluation

Clinical evidence for improving the efficiency and quality of the handling of operations in an OR suite has been documented. In an evaluation of a large OR suite using Cetrea Surgical, the clinicians stated that the system has reduced the number of interruptions, made it easier to find each other, helped maintain the overall overview of the unfolding of work, improved coordination and communication, and helps to mitigate and handle changes to the operating schedule during the day. These results has been presented at the international MedInfo 2007 congress in Brisbane, Australia.

  • TR Hansen and JE Bardram, "Applying Mobile and Pervasive Computer Technology to Enhance Coordination of Work in a Surgical Ward" inProceedings of MedInfo 2007. pages 189-200, Brisbane Australia. [pdf]

Using the Cetrea Business Intelligence™ tool we conducted a study, aiming at investigating the difference between the operating schedule as it is planned at the beginning of the day and the actual work done “by the end of the day” at a large OR suite. The results shows that:

  • Only 56% of all operation are planned ahead. The remaining
  • 44% are acute and thus scheduled ad-hoc.
  • 8 % of all operations are cancelled.
  • 31% of all operations are shortened or prolonged more than 30 minutes.
  • 67% of all planned (“elective”) operations are substantially changed.

Taken together, these figures imply that only 18% of an operation schedule is enacted as planned. Therefore, creating so-called “optimized” schedules can only be sub-optimal since they only encompass a little more than half of the operations. Furthermore, handling all these changes during the day of surgery requires extensive coordination and communication, which can be supported by a system like Cetrea Surgical™. This study was published and presented at the 2010 ACM Conference on Computers Supported Work in Savannah, USA:

  • JE Bardram and TR Hansen. Why the plan doesn’t hold – a study of situated planning, articulation and coordination work in a surgical ward. In Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2010. Savannah, GA, USA. ACM Press. (online)

Technology

The original ideas and technologies behind Cetrea Surgical™has been published and presented at ACM's conferences on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ACM CSCW):

  • JE Bardram and TR Hansen. The AWARE architecture: supporting context-mediated socail awareness in mobile cooperation. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on computer Supported Cooperative work, pages 192 - 201. ACM Press, 2004 (online).
  • JE Bardram, TR Hansen, M Soegaard. AwareMedia - A Shared Interactive Display Supporting Social, Temporal, and Spatial Awareness in Surgery, in Proceedings of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work pages 109-118, ACM Press 2006 (online).

The technology behind Cetrea's indoor location tracking of clinical personnel is based on the Java Context-Awareness (JCAF), which has been presented and published at the Pervasive 2005 conferencen i Munich, Germany. Subsequently, the experiences from using context-aware technologies inside a hospital have been presented at the UbiComp 2006 konferencen:

  • JE Bardram. The Java Context Awareness Framework (JCAF) - A Service Infrastructure and Programming Framework for Context-Aware Applications. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2005), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Munich Germany, May 2005. Springer Verlag (online)
  • JE Bardram, TR Hansen, M Mogensen and M Soegaard. Experiences from Real-World Deployment of Context-Aware Technologies in a Hospital Environment. In Proceedings of UbiComp 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Verlag, pages 369-386 (online)

The Cetrea technologies for improving patient safety in the operating room is based on research within context-aware computing inside operating rooms. The research has been published in the following paper:

  • JE Bardram and N Nørskov. A Context-aware Patient Safety System for the Operating Room. In Proceedings of Ubicomp 2008: Ubiquitous Computing, pages 272-281, 2008. (online)

Deployment

Our approach to deployment of pervasive computing technologies inside a hospital has been documented and published in an article in the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine:

  • TR Hansen, JE Bardram and M Soegaard. Moving out of the Lab: Deploying Pervasive Technologies in a Hospital. IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 5, no. 3, pages 24-31 (online)