Back to search

IKTPLUSS-IKT og digital innovasjon

Improving Quality of Healthcare Welfare Technology Solutions in City of Oslo

Alternative title: Forbedre kvalitet på IoT-baserte velferdsteknoligløsninger i Oslo kommune

Awarded: NOK 5.6 mill.

City of Oslo uses healthcare technological solutions to provide modern and secure services to its citizens. These are complex in nature and typically consist of a device and a cloud-based healthcare system to handle remote support to citizens. The device is usually placed in the citizen?s home or as a personal portable device, e.g. an automatic medicine dispenser placed in the home of a citizen to provide the right dose of medication at the right time without having health care personnel present each time. The dispenser and healthcare personnel can reach each other through the healthcare system using 4G network, e.g. the timing of the medication can be changed from an office at the local care centre. Innovative healthcare solutions generate a different set of demands to City of Oslo than already established services, e.g.; 1) the technology provides a 24-hour continuous critical service to citizen with high demands on security, 2) the technology collects big amounts of personal data with high demands on privacy, 3) new technologies are becoming available rapidly due to high innovation rate, 4) citizen?s needs evolving as fast as the technology. Combinations of 3) and 4) create demand for high changeability. Oslo has built a practice to test new technology before starting to use it. It is a manual and time-consuming process which reduces innovation rate. This project?s planned innovation is an automated testing tool using model-based engineering to manage the complexity and heterogeneity of the technologies. Using e.g. advanced machine learning to reveal unplanned activities in the ecosystems surrounding the technologies. The innovation will speed up testing new technologies, integrating new technologies into existing ecosystems, and continuously evaluating the suitability of the technologies in use. This will help Oslo provide the latest technologies to citizens in a timely fashion to improve their quality of life without compromising privacy, security and safety.

We will improve the current and future testing practice at City of Oslo (CoO) for testing IoT-based healthcare welfare technology solutions (e.g., automatic medicine dispenser) that provide welfare services to citizens. The tangible outputs will be an advanced automated testing software and a state-of-the-art test execution infrastructure for testing welfare technology solutions (WTSs). The testing software will be an extension of the testing software developed in a European project U-Test, whereas test execution infrastructure will be developed from the scratch based on the needs of the WTSs at CoO and possibly other municipalities in Oslo/Akershus region. We aim to ensure that the WTSs provided by CoO to its citizens are functionally correct, secure, and do not violate privacy, thus significantly improving the quality of WTSs and their provided services. The deployment of the testing software tool and test execution infrastructure at the CoO will help testers to conduct testing in a more systematic and automated manner, thereby improving the overall productivity of testers at the CoO leading to increased testing efficiency. The proposed innovation is essential for the CoO and other municipalities since 1) the WTSs provide critical services to citizens with high demands on availability, security, and privacy, 2) new services provided by the WTSs are added continuously due to rapidly evolving requirements from citizens, 3) the complexity of WTSs in increasing, 4) integration of new services in the existing WTSs is complex, 5) new technologies are becoming available quickly due to high innovation rate. WTT4Oslo will ensure that WTSs are adaptive to future requirements and technologies. Thus, the WTSs will keep functioning correctly without violating any security and privacy concerns. The proposed software will be extensible and configurable such that we can use them to test welfare technologies in other municipalities in Norway with minimum effort.

Funding scheme:

IKTPLUSS-IKT og digital innovasjon