(Edmonton, AB., June 4, 2010) – Cybera announces the completion of its coordination of three pilot projects which have produced innovations in the areas of eHealth, cloud computing, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The Secure Electronic Health Records Infrastructure (SEHRI) Project, DataGardens Virtualization Project, and TRLabs Service Composition Project were initiated in 2008 and collectively valued at more than $2.5 million.
The SEHRI project was a collaboration between Cybera and researchers at the iCore Information Security Lab in the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary’s (UofC), and the Health Innovation and Technology Information Center (HiiTEC) at the UofC. Together, they developed a unique system design for protection of data in Electronic Health Records (EHR) that allows only authorized personnel to access patients’ data – guaranteeing that patients’ consent is enforced and their privacy protected.
“Electronic Health Records contain a wealth of sensitive information about individuals. They are of growing interest because they provide a versatile way of sharing patients’ data among health professionals and researchers,” says Rei Safavi-Naini, computing sciences professor and project lead at the University of Calgary. “The SEHRI design guarantees that personal health information will be only accessible to those who are authorized – that's the tangible benefit of the system,” she says.
There are plans to implement the first version of the SEHRI system later this year for use by researchers at the UofC’s Faculty of Medicine. Additional SEHRI project partners included MITACS, and the UofC’s Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Business.
Cybera’s DataGardens Virtualization Project was a partnership with Edmonton-based software development company, DataGardens, to address the challenges associated with managing, synchronizing and provisioning IT infrastructure across multiple sites. A portion of the project was supported in part by the Alberta government's Alberta Innovation Voucher Pilot Program.
“CyberaNet was used as a testbed environment to see how efficient we were about exchanging critical information,” says Geoff Hayward, CEO of DataGardens. “We only want to send critical information because bandwidth between sites is such a precious resource.”
The project partners included Cybera, DataGardens, Alberta Advanced Education and Technology, Precarn, and the University of Alberta’s Department of Computing Sciences.
The third project, the TRLabs Service Composition Project, was a collaboration between Cybera and TRLabs to investigate an efficient mechanism for packaging third-party content, such as movies and TV shows. The results of this project have the potential to benefit large telecommunications service providers.
“If you want to watch a movie, you’ll be able to get content down to the device very efficiently and play the content wherever you may be,” says Bob Davies, Head eHome R&D at TRLabs. “This project was about being able to allocate resources and it kind of opens the world up.”
As these three projects comes to a close, Cybera is looking to leverage the expertise its staff have gained, and the technologies that have been developed into other pilot project initiatives.
“Cybera is currently collaborating on five CANARIE-funded projects, and we are seeking new partnerships in the areas of health, ICT, and energy and environment,” says Jill Kowalchuk, Vice President, Project & Partnership Development for Cybera. “Our specialized expertise and infrastructure facilitates the development and testing of new technologies, advancing innovations and ideas to the marketplace."
Cybera support its pilot projects with numerous services, including project management and consulting the areas of cloud computing, advanced networking, high performance computing, and data management. For more information on Cybera’s Pilot Project Program, please click here, or send an email.
To read the full press release, click here.
