Coming Soon…

It’s been two years since we launched the development of the research platform. Last year we completed another installation in Greece; now a team of General Practitioners are able to collect data on-line using shared protocols and questionnaires and export all the data directly to XML for further analysis. They can also manage patients alongside questionnaires in a flexible way. The lack of EMR systems in Greece, the need of a cloud tool for teamwork and further special requirements, such as the ability to work in rural areas, made our platform a perfect fit.

In the meantime, we published the results of a study in the Telemedicine and e-Health journal, which was based on an application of our platform (A Web-Based Versus Paper Questionnaire on Alcohol and Tobacco in Adolescents). The team had a great time working on a modified version of the platform and the feedback from its application was of great value.

Furthermore, this week we completed the development of another new feature of the platform. It is now possible to create questionnaires and protocols and email them to doctors, patients or other users, who will easily fill them in and submit them to the web-stored database. What is more, the “protocol manager” can use both modes (the classic and the emailing one) to collect data. We continue our hard work, brewing new ideas and enhancing the project with additional features. And above all, we are pleased to announce that we will accelerate our efforts and the development of our platform in a drastic way onwards.

the Lumos! platform and Drupal

Dear all,

My name is Silvio Cambiaso and I am one of the team members who developed the Lumos! project. I am an electronic Engineer, working for several IT companies since 1995, and recently completely fond of this spectacular web-development framework called Drupal.

When I first got in touch with this technology -I was told by a friend of mine about it, it was just curiosity but it soon became something more charming and amazing I could imagine. It’s now a couple of years that I’ve been working with Drupal, experiencing some projects for my personal work and some more for other purposes.

Then the idea came up. One day I was talking with Harris about medical research. We spoke about the typical requirements GPs involved in research usually have: planning medical researches based on surveys, managing teams working on them and collecting their data.

Then some more concrete concepts came across, so we thought about setting up a tool to give an answer to those needs. But there’s some more: why not making it with a web-based tool? And if so, why not Drupal?

All these questions drove us to develop such a project, designing a web-based platform, we called Lumos! platform.

Drupal helped us so much to develop the extra modules we need to achieve our goals, giving us in addition the advantages of ready made modules, brought by the framework, such as user management (for login, groups, roles), theme management (for easy customization of the look and feel), security protection, localization and so on. Plus an easy architecture where extra modules are installed and run by the framework itself with simple actions made on the settings web page.

The php language (used to write modules in Drupal) gave us a strong and quick ability to design the tool and to fix bugs (setting up a debugging system, with local or remote site). The application is based on the mysql database, a freeware worldwide used db. Currently we’re working hard to setup the first revision, 1.0, of our application, and we look forward to exposing to visitors some screenshots of it once ready.

Stay tuned 😉

Silvio Cambiaso

Welcome to Lumos!

Dear visitors,

After almost two years in thinking and working, here we are! Welcome to the first step towards a complete new site about the Lumos! platform.

The Lumos! platform has been developed on the basis of a simple request: how can we improve quantitative medical research performed by teams. The fruit of this effort is a web-based platform which permits to build and manage collaborative multicenter studies easily.

Several projects have been put in motion based on the platform. Firstly, the Italian Academy of Family Physicians (AIMEF) has carried-out a validation study with the use of this platform. Likewise, the Auror study team of Junior GPs based in Bologna, Italy, has been using the platform for a few of their protocols.

Using the experience and feedback of the abovementioned studies, our team works on improving the platform and helping the needs of medical research.

As for the future, we hope to take the next step by making this platform widely available to many languages and offer more services, which may vary from autonomous offer of the product to integrated research services. We also have in the works the English, German, Spanish and Greek translations, as three new European partnerships based on the Lumos! platform are ready to be launched.

Yours,

Harris Lygidakis