Health informatics

Overview

Technological innovations that represent significant advances in the practice of medicine are announced almost daily. Many of these innovations stem from the field of health informatics, a field that seeks to enhance the human condition and the delivery of healthcare by applying methods and theories drawn from computer science.

The research questions we explore represent the full spectrum of health informatics, ranging from scientists whose work contributes to a better understanding of how to cure disease, through to those whose efforts explore how approaches anchored in computer science can enable people to live healthy lives. Representative problem domains of current projects include medical image processing, genomic analysis, assistive technologies for older adults, natural language generation of tailored treatment descriptions, data mining of electronic health records, chronic disease monitoring by wearable sensors, software engineering, privacy-enhancing technologies, computational neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and ubiquitous computing.

The University of Waterloo has a long tradition of fostering strong links with industry. Many of our research projects are conducted in partnership with the healthcare community, the public health sector, and major industry players. Partners include local and federal governments, public health units, more than 150 hospitals ranging from major academic health science centres to small rural facilities, long-term care facilities and nursing homes, in addition to companies such as Microsoft, Agfa, Intel, Google, and BlackBerry.

In addition to research-based graduate degree programs, members of our research group contribute to Waterloo’s Master of Health Informatics degree.