Ericsson US and the MobileLab group at the University of Texas in Dallas (UTD) are joining forces to develop healthcare applications based on IMS technology.

Roger Walland, Vice President, Strategy for Multimedia Applications and IMS at Ericsson US, says the program is a three-way cooperation, involving the UTD, Ericsson, and Texas Instruments (TI).

TI is contributing a new hardware platform for use in mobile phones, providing processing and graphics capability. Ericsson and the UTD group will collaboratively develop service capabilities and service logic utilizing the TI platform, the Ericsson Service Development Studio (SDS) and Web 2.0 capabilities, along with sensor devices from the medical field for the collection and distribution of biometric information..

“The program started in September, and so far we have had several meetings to define the scope of the project, and have now defined the responsibilities for the students and research groups,” Walland says. “Funding for the program overall has also been provided. Now the fun part of developing the working application and solution begins.

“We are linked to a study group at the UTD that focuses on medical applications. Together, we are working on a couple of ideas related to healthcare and sports performance. Our ideas are based on using a body sensor network, monitoring functions such as respiration and heartbeat. This data is then streamed to servers connected to the network, to be used by health and performance-monitoring applications.

“In one of our ideas, we use GPS to map the body-sensor data to position, for instance, for a person out training. At home the person can log on to a web page where the recorded data, mapped to the training run, is displayed showing the performance along the way.”

The cooperation with the UTD involves collaboration with MobileLab, a research group housed at the university, and a group of PhD students and professors from several academic disciplines. Ericsson has already provided the UTD with the SDS, so the students can start getting familiar with it, Walland says.  

Ericsson will benefit from this cooperation, he says, by increasing the exposure of IMS in the university world because that is where future developers are trained. The company may also be able to hire some of the students when they finish their studies.

Ericsson’s main interface for the program at the UTD is Professor Dean Terry, who is the Director of MobileLab. Professor Terry says: “This project provides our students with an invaluable opportunity to work collaboratively with Ericsson on an innovative technology project. Helping to develop new ways to communicate and deliver consumer and critical health information is part of the mission of the UTD’s MobileLab.”

The goal is to have a demonstrable solution ready for the CTIA show in Las Vegas in April 2009.

UTD
SDS 
IMS
Ericsson IMS Campaign site

By Benny Ritzén