Research Projects

Funding

External funding for the research lab includes six external research grants, including four Australian Research Council grants, one DIISR International Science Linkage grant and an ADHC Applied Research Grant.

Current Projects

Mobile and Wireless Technologies

Emerging mobile and wireless technologies can enable a range of innovations and new capacities in healthcare. Our work in this area includes international collaboration with the University of California, Santa Cruz and Microsoft Research.

Social Networks and Social Media for Healthcare

Current work investigates the role of social networks in health communications between patients, clinicians and researchers. This includes both peer support group capabilities and also innovative approaches to public health communication and preventative health.

Nutrition Informatics

We define Nutrition Informatics as the study of the capture, storage, integration, processing and use of digitized nutrition, food and diet-related information, via means of computing, software, communications and peripheral systems. Our work in this area is investigating new informatics-based technologies that can transform dietary choice, guidance and information capture.

Secure Electronic Health Records

The privacy and security of personal health data is a key concern for health information systems. Our current research addresses trusted interaction, role-based access control, privacy and secure architectures in general for electronic and personal health records.

Ontology-based Rich Data Representation

There is significant structure and semantic relationships in health terminologies and the common and emergin health data standards. Generic ontology-mapping techniques being developed in the group bear on the future representation and semantic interoperability of health data.'Rich' computer-represented health data will provide a foundation for many future developments in health information systems and indeed health care more broadly.

Health Innovations for the Elderly

Health information technologies can support greater home-based and community-based care for the elderly. Our work in this area concentrates on mobile technologies that can assist in this regard.