Opportunities

Existing Funding:

·      "Positron Emission Tomography Guided Prostate Biopsy", NIH/NCI grant, $206,000, 9/1/04-6/30/06.

·      "Center for East-West Medicine Projects", international support for research, Ministry of Education, Taiwan, ROC, July 1996 … , $237,000 (UH Foundation).

·      "Computing and Electronic System Development", Private donation, $12,294 (UH Foundation).

Active Opportunities:

·        The Ohana Health Online (OHO) remote monitoring system is a realization of the "Virtual Clinic" concept for online delivery of healthcare decisions and patient support at the 6-year-old Website, www.the-ohanahealth.org, which provides continuous and persistent advices for chronic disease (particularly, diabetes) patients.  Continuing maintenance and support for patients using the OHO system, as well as additional enhancement of service features, require consistent attention, as OHO advance into the global healthcare to reach beyond the Hawaiian populations (at Waianae, North Kohala, and Hana) to the Marshall Islands or the Philippines.  Such online delivery of healthcare services should be similarly extended and easily applied to other diseases, such as COPD, asthma, hypertension and menopause management, using the same platform and technologies underlying OHO.  Such service extension projects would require collaborative efforts of medical and technology practitioners and students.  Undergraduate students should also be able to contribute to these projects, and use them to satisfy x96 requirements.

·        The Center for East-West Medicine Projects has been funded (by the Ministry of Education, Taiwan, since 1995) and continues use remaining funds to pursue instrumentation development and diagnostic software based on scientific principles.  In line with the pursuits of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in the Western world, the use of electro-magnetic measurements at acupuncture points, which have been know and shown (for thousands of years in the East) to be directly linked to functioning organs via the meridian channels and provide vital bio-feedback signals with significant diagnostic values.  Experimental results include the confirmation of existence, measurability and controllability of Chi (bio-energy).  Signal interpretation software that automates diagnosis and support the validation of such non-invasive measurements at acupuncture point measurements are being pursued, which also require collaborative efforts of medical and technology practitioners and students.  In this case, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, or acupuncture, with the desire of applying technology and deploying scientific research principles also have the potential to make significant contributions to this interdisciplinary and international field of research.