Healthcare the focus of CSIRO's new IT centre

Healthcare projects like personal health monitoring and distance medical care will be core issues at CSIRO's new national ICT research centre.

About 200 CSIRO engineers, research scientists and mathematicians will form the nucleus of the centre, which is headquartered at Ryde in Sydney but which is made up of eight sites around the country.

The centre's annual budget of about AUD$40 million, and the CeNTIE consortium -- of which the new ICT centre is a major part -- has just been awarded a further $10.1 million in funding from the federal government's department of communications, IT and the arts.

One of the centre's more mature projects is a credit-card sized device which can continuously monitor hear rate, respiration and movement, alerting medical authorities if vital signs signal the need for intervention. "We're also working on developing software which can raise an alarm if people have a fall," said Laurie Wilson, head of the centre's e-health group.

The centre's e-health team is collaborating with the Queensland government on a trial in patients recovering from stroke. "We work with both industry and end users," said Wilson. "At the moment we're looking at commercialising both the personal monitoring system and critical care unit."

Another of the centre's projects is a virtual critical care unit, enabled by an ultra-high bandwidth telemedicine system. The unit is currently set up to link the emergency department of the rural Katoomba hospital with specialists from Penrith's Nepean hospital. "In many cases it prevents the unnecessary evacuation of that patient to Nepean," said Wilson.