BLESS U stand for Bandar Lampung Enhanced Smart-health Services with Smart Ubiquity. BLESS U is an 18 months project that will complement existing smart city projects in Indonesia by developing a proof-of-concept Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled smart clinic to automate primary healthcare services provided by clinics in Bandar Lampung and to address the inequitable distribution of healthcare services between urban and rural areas through potential integration of IoT and satellite technologies for remote healthcare service delivery in rural extremes.
BLESS U will transform current paper-based clinical services with smart technologies in Bandar Lampung. It will assess the rural-urban divide in healthcare provision in both the Yorkshire region of UK and in the Lampung province of Indonesia to provide recommendation on how resources in urban cities can be shared with rural areas. BLESS U should therefore be seen as an initial phase in establishing Bandar Lampung as one of major smart cities in Indonesia and the Lampung province as an exemplar province to lessen the rural-urban gap in healthcare provision. It will also help catalyse the digital rural development in the UK. BLESS U will base its system architecture design on existing patient pathways and clinical processes to minimise service disruption and the hardware/software platforms will be associated to a semantic smart service (3S) framework, identified as vital to the successful outcomes of the work. A multidisciplinary team of communications and electronics engineers, computer scientists, and process management scientist from the University of Bradford (UoB), UK and University of Lampung (Unila), Indonesia with support from Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB) Indonesia, industries, local governments and non-profit research organisations will ensure project goals be reached.
Project Aims and Objectives
The main objectives of the BLESS U Project are:
- To develop an IoT-enabled smart clinic demonstrator for automated and ubiquitous access to healthcare services and validate the smart clinic concept through laboratory trial and evaluation
- To identify gaps in healthcare provision in rural extremes and investigate the use of IoT and satellite technologies for rural healthcare delivery
- To define a semantic smart service (3S) framework to model semantically the patient pathways and clinical processes including the delivery of associated information, the interactions between clinic, hospital and pharmacist, etc. for secure healthcare provision, taking into account security and patients’ own mobility and access to mobile technologies
- To build institutional capacity for researchers’ professional development to maintain research excellence
- To disseminate BLESS U activities and outcomes through workshops, research seminars, conferences, high quality publications and media.
