The Ericsson R&D center in Spain and operator Telefónica have been cooperating with the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) to develop e-health IMS applications and build telecom expertise.

Jose Miguel Alonso, Open Innovation manager at the Ericsson R&D center in Spain, says the cooperation began six years ago. It is now part of a global IMS program, conducted in collaboration with Spain-based Telefónica Global, and has grown from involving just a couple of university staff in the first year into an extensive program.

Jose Miguel Alonso, Ruth Pallares and Antoine De Poorter

Ruth Pallares and Antoine De Poorter, solution architects at the Ericsson R&D center in Spain, are both deeply involved in the collaboration with UPM. They say that today it involves university professionals from four different departments. These professionals are all very experienced in telecommunications and are either working on their doctorates, or they already have PhDs.

De Poorter says: “Their intention is to stay at the university, working as teachers and in research. This creates a stable situation allowing us to work with the same people over several years and to be sure that the university maintains expertise in this area.” 

The cooperation is run through two different projects, both developing services for Telefónica, based on IMS and using SDS; one e-health care service and one multi-video conferencing service.

Pallares says the services are realized by a set of IMS general-purpose enablers, some of which are shared between the two projects. These enablers are defined by Ericsson in cooperation with the university staff, who are responsible for the development. The Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) for the enablers, however, are owned by Ericsson.

Half of the basic IMS enablers will be available by the end of this year, Pallares says, and the rest during the first half of next year. The first delivery of enablers will be used for proof-of-concept testing later this year, based on four types of access: mobile phones, PCs, fixed phones with video capabilities, and television sets.

Pallares and De Poorter both stress that the two projects are running at full speed. “This is not something for the future. This is happening right now,” they say.

Both projects are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2009, after which new use cases will be identified, which should lead to new development projects. For the e-health area, there is already a new feature road map for the next year.

Alonso says that, together with Telefónica, they are currently in discussions with a few e-health-care companies: “They are very excited by our e-health service and see a lot of potential cost savings,” he says. “Our intention is to market the service to e-health companies worldwide in cooperation with operators.

“We are not involved in these projects primarily for research and innovation, but to get return on our investments and to boost the IMS technology. That’s one reason why we engaged Telefónica in the cooperation right from the beginning.”

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By Benny Ritzén