At the Fraunhofer Project Center MEOS, scientists are working on the early detection of diseases such as COVID-19. MEOS Director Dr. Michael Scholles describes in an interview how digital networking is changing research.
Dr. Scholles, at the Fraunhofer Project Center for Microelectronic and Optical Systems for Biomedicine (MEOS), you are working on COVID-19, among other things. What exactly are you working on?
Dr. Michael Scholles: The state of health of COVID-19 patients can deteriorate very quickly. At the same time, there are currently no adequate technical options for predicting this deterioration in normal hospital wards. This is where our M³Infekt project comes in: We can use sensors to measure a wide range of vital parameters in patients. Artificial intelligence then uses the data to recognize how the patient’s condition will develop in the near future. As a result, doctors know very early on whether and when a patient needs to be transferred from the normal ward to the intensive care unit. This will save us valuable time. However, the system is currently still in the testing phase.
Is such a system also suitable for remote diagnosis – i.e. for patients who are at home with an illness?
Scholles: That is certainly a long-term goal for this system, which is also suitable for many cases outside of COVID-19. However, in addition to further technical development, the external conditions must be right: We need a digital infrastructure with high bandwidths and sufficiently low latency. In rural areas, where such instruments would be particularly useful, this infrastructure is often not yet available to the necessary extent.
For M³Infekt, Fraunhofer Institutes at different locations have joined forces with their developments. What role does the digital infrastructure play in your day-to-day research?
Scholles: A functioning digital infrastructure is a basic prerequisite for us and our work. The scientists at the Fraunhofer Project Center MEOS are in constant communication with their home institutes in Dresden, Jena and Leipzig. In this case, communication primarily means exchanging large volumes of data. Of course, this requires a good digital connection. Particularly in the scientific field, it can be very important that the latencies in data exchange are low, that there is practically a real-time exchange.
How has digitalization changed your work?
Scholles: The big data approach of collecting large amounts of data, processing it electronically and merging several existing research projects into a new one would not have been possible ten years ago. Back then, we were already able to collect vital parameters digitally, for example via smartwatches and similar devices. The big difference was that this data was stored locally and users could only read their pulse or warnings about critical health conditions on the watch display. Today, systems can be networked and data permeability is very high – at least in theory.
You mention data protection. How does the topic and the debate about data security in healthcare influence research?
Scholles: There is undoubtedly a difference between my purchasing behavior being recorded as part of big data and my health and vital parameters. In this respect, special, highly secure systems are also required in the medical field in order to gain people’s trust. A very important point here is that data security must be considered from the outset when developing new systems – privacy by design, in other words. This is the only way to be successful in the healthcare sector in the future.