Medical Summer School

Towards building sustainable and co-created telemedicine systems in Western Balkan Countries
4-8 September 2023
4-8 September 2023
Seville, 27-May-2022. We congratulate Maksym Gaiduk on the successful defense of his doctoral thesis at the Universidad de Sevilla. Maksym was awarded the doctorate with honors and he also received the extended degree of the European Doctorate of the University.
Sleep and its peculiarities have been the subject of research at HTWG Konstanz for many years. Maksym Gaiduk has focused his research in the Ubiquitous Computing Lab on the classification of sleep stages with a minimal set of physiological parameters. Through his methodological approach, the number of physiological parameters required for sleep stage classification has been successively reduced to two: Respiratory and Movement signals.
Gaiduk states that "the aim is to support the development of devices for noninvasive measurement of relevant physiological parameters and the use of such systems to detect other sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea." The systems are intended to be used primarily in patients' homes as a preventive measure, to relieve the burden on sleep laboratories, and to be useful in the long term.
His doctoral supervisor Prof. Dr. Ralf Seepold explains, "Maksym is one of our pioneers in sleep medicine research at HTWG, who has done a lot of groundwork and shows outstanding research achievements." Maksym Gaiduk has already received an award for a relevant publication from the University in Seville in 2021, and he has once again underscored that excellent research has its place at HTWG.
Maksym Gaiduk started his career at Reutlingen University, where he obtained a Master in Computer Science. Subsequently, he joined the group of Prof. Dr. Seepold at the HTWG Konstanz, where he supported lectures as his assistant on the one hand and was able to conduct his research in different projects on the other hand. Extensive stays abroad in seven countries and, last but not least, the intensive support of his second PhD supervisor Prof. Dr. Juan Antonio Ortega from Seville rounded off his scientific education. Since 2016, this has resulted in more than 40 publications in which he has contributed as an author or co-author. In the future, he will contribute his expertise to the Carl Zeiss Foundation's Morpheus project.
Members of the tribunal and supervisors congratulating Maksym Gaiduk.
f.l.t.r. Prof. Dr. Seepold, Prof. Dr. Martínez Álvarez, Prof. Dr. Martínez Madrid, Dr. Gaiduk, Prof. Dr. Gómez López, Prof. Dr. Penzel, Prof. Dr. Angulo Bahón, Prof. Dr. Ortega
2-6 August 2022
Sevilla, 13.01.2022. The University of Seville has awarded HTWG doctoral student Maksym Gaiduk for his outstanding research results. In an official act of the Faculty of Computer Science, the certificate was ceremoniously presented in Seville shortly before Christmas. The article, titled "Estimation of Sleep Stages Analyzing Respiratory and Movement Signals," was selected by a committee of faculty as the best scientific article of the month of July and was ultimately awarded third best research article of 2021.
Only about 100 publications met the committee's strict quality standards, and 12 of them were selected - one publication for each month. The criteria included, for example, the degree of scientific foundation, its impact, the scientific principles developed, the impact index, as well as the contribution to the internationalization of research and the excellence of the journal. Of the 100 papers originally nominated, all were of excellent quality (69 percent are in the first quartile of the Journal Citation Report).
"This article demonstrates the strength of international and interdisciplinary collaborations in sleep medicine that make such successes possible. Therefore, special thanks go to the co-authors," explains Maksym Gaiduk, who works in the Ubiquitous Computing Lab under the scientific direction of Prof. Dr. Seepold. These results were produced in cooperation with researchers from the University of Seville (Prof. Dr. Ortega and Dr. Perea), Reutlingen University (Prof. Dr. Martínez Madrid) and Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Prof. Dr. Thomas Penzel and Dr. Martin Glos).
Gaiduk's work is part of the research on interdisciplinary sleep medicine at HTWG. His work aims to provide an algorithm for automatic classification of sleep stages. It uses only signals that can be obtained non-invasively, such as motion and respiratory signals. In the future, this approach should help provide cost-effective and accurate sleep analysis. In this way, sleep disorders can be diagnosed at an early stage. Therapies can be initiated more quickly to improve health status and quality of life.
With an impact factor of 5.772 (as of 2020), the Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics is not only among the leaders from the first quartile of high-quality journals, but even among the top five journals from the entire knowledge area of mathematical and computational biology.
The pre-publication version of the article can already be accessed, and the final publication will be released by IEEE in the coming months:
M. Gaiduk, J. J. Perea, R. Seepold, N. Martínez Madrid, T. Penzel, M. Glos, and J. A. Ortega, "Estimation of Sleep Stages Analyzing Respiratory and Movement Signals," IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2021, doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2021.3099295.
Persons in the picture (from left to right): Prof. Dr. María del Carmen Graciani Díaz, Prof. Dr. José Luis Sevillano Ramos, Cristina Rubio Escudero, Maksym Gaiduk
The link to the HTWG article is this.
2-4 November 2021 and 13-16 December 2021
The binational workshop (Germany-Italy) aims to develop social innovation in long-term care (LTC) through digitalization. In a three-day event, individual solutions will be examined and developed. The participants will present their process innovations regarding LTC (inventory) and then compare them. Digital social innovation roadmaps will be derived from individual definitions. Furthermore, innovative approaches will be elaborated in cross-national working groups and with the involvement of young scientists. Subsequently, individual concepts for traceable process evaluation and sustainability will be discussed.
The workshop is free of charge. It will be both in virtual and physical participation following the Italian Government rules (green pass is required).
The workshop will focus on LTC relevant approaches with special emphasis on the following hot topics
Some sessions are available for remote access. Please find below the session and the link to the session stream
10.00-13.00 Session 1 “Definition of digital social innovation roadmap”
10.00-13:00 Round table “Comparison of the LTC (long-term care) processes of the cooperation partners”
10.00-13:00 Session 3 “Concepts for comprehensible process evaluation and sustainability”
10.00-13:00 Session 3 “Concepts for comprehensible process evaluation and sustainability”
Remote connection no registration required
In presence: Only with green pass (access free of charge, up to the maximum of the room capability) but pre-registration required by email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Contributions must be related to the focus topics in the participating countries (Germany and Italy) and address one of the following areas:
In case you want to participate in the Workshop, you may select one of the following formats to express your interest. Remember: The language of the Workshop is English, all contributions (written and oral) must be in English language.
Please decide what type of contribution is planned:
The conference organizers will publish a book in the series Lecture Notes in Bioengineering (LNBE) after both events have taken place. Accepted contributions will be invited to contribute to the LNBE project with an extended version of the paper. More details are communicated later. There will be no conference proceedings distributed during the events but a program schedule and all abstracts will be made available.
Submission: Where to upload the material?
We are using EasyChair to collect your contribution, please use this link.
Massimo Conti (Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy)
Natividad Martínez Madrid (Reutlingen University, Germany)
Simone Orcioni (Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy)
Ralf Seepold (HTWG Konstanz, Germany)
A. Brito, Univ. Federal da Paraiba, João Pessoa, Brazil
M.Conti, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, IT
L. Fanucci, Univ. of Pisa, IT
V. Frascolla, Intel Mobile Communications, Neubiberg, Germany
M. Grammatikakis, Hellenic Mediterranean University, Crete, GR
N. Martínez Madrid, Reutlingen University, Germany
G. Masetti, Università degli Studi di Bologna, IT
P. Mihova, New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria
S. Orcioni, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, IT
Y. Orlov, Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Russian Federation
G. Palumbo, Univ. of Catania, IT
P. Friedrich, HS Kempten, Germany.
L. Pieralisi, ARM, UK
M. Radetzki, Univ.of Stuttgart, Germany
S. Saponara, Univ. of Pisa, IT
R. Seepold, HTWG, Konstanz, Germany
T. Tarim, Texas Instruments, USA
E. Zanaj, Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania
Lucas Weber (HTWG Konstanz, Germany)
Simone Orcioni (Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy)
currently closed
DAAD is supporting the Workshops with a limited number of scholarships. You (as a contributor or participant) might be eligible to receive a DAAD scholarship; it is covering your expenses (travel, accommodation or meals). In order to apply, we would need the following information: Name, residence address, affiliation, status (student, Ph.D., professor, etc.), CV, Motivation letter (max. 1 page), or proof of an accepted contribution for this event. The funding is based on the guidelines of DAAD; it is personal and non-transferable. There is no legal entitlement to a scholarship. If you have any questions, please contact us in good time..
Your application should be sent to Ralf Seepold (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). Applications submitted later may not be considered.
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The activity is supported by DAAD grant no 57562968.
Konstanz, November 2020. The Carl-Zeiss-Foundation supports an interdisciplinary research project of the HTWG for three years with up to 1 million Euros. One of the cooperation partners is Charité Berlin.
Konstanz, October 2020. Lucas Weber successfully participated in this year's Physionet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge (2020).
Hamburg, November 2019. Several scientific studies confirm the relationship between movement, breathing, and heart rate with sleep phases. And these parameters can be determined in a more convenient way than by the PSG. The aim of this work is to use these bio vital data and the corresponding algorithmic background to carry out an initial investigation of the sleep-wake structure as a diagnostic step in a home environment.
Berlin, July 2019. Information and communication technologies support telemedicine to lower health access barriers and to provide better health care. While the potential in Active Assisted Living (AAL) is increasing, it is difficult to evaluate its benefits for the user, and it requires coordinated actions to launch it.
Stuttgart, August 2019. At the beginning of August 2019, the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Economics, Labour and Housing approved the project "Construction and operation of a (virtual) competence centre for market and business processes Smart Home & Living Baden-Württemberg" with a funding volume of 1 million Euros. From HTWG Konstanz, the Ubiquitous Computing Lab of Prof. Dr. Seepold is working on the design of the expert system and the communication platform.
Malta, June 2019. Maksym Gaiduk and Ralf Seepold presented the results from the IBH Lab running at the Lake Konstanz at the 11th International KES Conference.
Granada, May 2019. Maksym Gaiduk has presented the results of research on the Influence of illuminance on sleep onset latency by 7th International Work-Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering.
Konstanz, September 29, 2018. For the first time, the computer science faculties of the HTWG and Reutlingen University of Applied Sciences have organized a German-Russian summer school together with Moscow's Sechenov University. With great success - even before its end a repetition was considered.
What developments in computer science will shape the medicine of the future? Where can it support everyday medical practice? How can diagnoses be made easier? And how do new media actually change the relationship between doctor and patient? These are just a few of the questions the German-Russian Summer School dealt with on the subject of medical informatics. For the first time, the computer science faculties of the HTWG and the Reutlingen University of Applied Sciences organized the event together with the Moscow Sechenov University. Sechenov University is the oldest Russian educational institution for health and care. It has a large medical faculty and offers further life science-oriented courses of study.
Within two weeks, eight female and two male students of the still young "General Medicine" course of study at the Russian university gained insights not only into the fields of application of modern medical informatics, but also direct experience reports from users in the German and Swiss health care system.
While the first week of the Summer School at Reutlingen University focused on the theoretical possibilities of Big Data, Blockchain, Wearables and virtual reality, the second week of the program at the HTWG in Constance focused on application. "It brought me an incredible amount of benefit that we were able to hear the experiences of practitioners in the application," said a Russian student in retrospect. The versatile programme included a guided tour of the Constance Hospital by the head of radiology, Prof. Dr. Markus Juchems, and a lecture by Dr. Sabine Schmidt-Weitmann (photo), who, as a "tele-doctor" with a team of doctors, tested online consultation hours via e-mail at the University Hospital and researched the response of patients to the offer.
Prof. Dr. Ralf Seepold, who co-initiated and organised the Summer School, led the programme in Constance. "Our goal was to show the broad spectrum of possible applications of computer science in digital medicine and to provide an insight into future trends," he said. Prof. Dr. Christian Wache from the HTWG Health Informatics course of studies addressed the compatibility of medical data in a workshop, while PhD student Maksym Gaiduk presented the possibilities of non-invasive sleep research. Two students, who had already worked in the sleep laboratory in Russia themselves, tested the new applications on their own during the summer school. "The exchange of knowledge is a great benefit. Cooperation between universities worldwide will have to become a matter of course in view of the new developments. I am delighted to be able to participate," said one student.
The mixture of lectures, laboratory visits, excursions and practical workshops was so well received that a repetition was already being considered before the end of the Summer School. (aw)
Further information about the program:
https://uc-lab.in.htwg-konstanz.de/grss.html
Link to the article in German: https://www.htwg-konstanz.de/aktuelles/news/summerschool-blickt-auf-medizininformatik/
Caption: Dr. Sabine Schmidt-Weitmann worked at the University Hospital as a "tele-doctor" with a team of doctors, testing online consultation hours by e-mail and researching the response of patients to the offer. She presented her results during the German-Russian Summer School.