Welcome to ACIS TeleCenter

TeleCenter is a web-based application to support research data management and multidisciplinary collaboration. It was developed in collaboration between the Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies (CChIPS) at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and the Center for Autonomic Computing (CAC) at the University of Florida. Both Centers participate in the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center program of the National Science Foundation. Support for the work in development of the TeleCenter has been provided through two fundamental research supplements awarded to CChIPS and CAC, and by a collaborative NSF award to the University of Florida and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The objective of the fundamental research supplements was to conduct the formative research and testing necessary to identify opportunities for application of information technologies and related infrastructure to overcome barriers to advancing traffic safety for children, youth, and young adults. TeleCenter represents a prototype application developed as an outcome of this work. The objective of the collaborative award was the creation, deployment, and management cyberinfrastructure for collaborative review of cases of child death, aiming to identify strategies to improve children’s safety .

TeleCenter was developed initially to support regular multi-disciplinary research discussions that CHOP hosted in support of its work in the Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN). CIREN is a multi-center research network sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that involves a collaboration of clinicians, engineers, epidemiologists and other traffic safety researchers in academia, industry, and government. CIREN's mission is to improve the prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation of motor vehicle crash injuries to reduce deaths, disabilities, and human and economic costs. During the time period of TeleCenter’s development, served as the only child-focused Center in the network.

Building on the positive feedback from the initial TeleCenter design and deployment, subsequent development targeted the requirements of collaborative meetings that take place as part of Child Fatality Review (CFR) programs . These programs aim to describe the circumstances surrounding children deaths and inform preventive measures. The TeleCenter was re-designed to meet the needs of CFR, in general, and to allow for local customization by the CFR team leader. Upgrades to the technology were made to enhance compatibility on different platforms, to increase security functionality, and to integrate third-party software into the appliance. This also entailed the generalization and extension of the TeleCenter technology to allow for customizable interfaces and workflow, and the hardening of core infrastructure and software for uninterrupted operation and automated backup and restart. The resulting TeleCenter is currently undergoing trials by CFR teams and also being used to support collaborative research efforts at the University of Florida and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

 

Grants

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award numbers CNS-1042644, CNS-1042642, IIP-0535463 and IIP-1034595. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the these organizations.