How artificial intelligence helps children breathe

Breathing – a matter of course for most of us. Not so for the 18 children of the Kinderhaus AtemReich. They rely on machines for their every breath. A cloud-based solution with artificial intelligence is now helping them feel better.

In Short

CHALLENGE

Vast amount of medical data that could not be collected and analyzed thoroughly.

SOLUTION

Microsoft Azure based solution that integrates data and devices for long-term analyses.

BENEFIT

Knowing in time when the children are not doing well and having more time for them.

Our Solution

It’s ten o’clock in the morning at Kinderhaus AtemReich. On the first floor, five of the children are having their school lessons. The daily ritual includes transforming into superheroes: The lights are turned off, there’s music playing, and the children are given objects that light up. What child doesn’t dream of being a superhero, if even just for a day? The children at Kinderhaus AtemReich are not like most children, though: They all receive artificial respiration for a number of medical reasons and require intensive care.
One of them is Maxi, who is thirteen years old and has lived at Kinderhaus AtemReich since birth. Like many of the other children here, Maxi is not able to speak. His communication is further limited by the fact that he is also blind and deaf. “The care workers’ primary indications of how Maxi and the other children are doing come from their vital signs. In the past, these were recorded manually from the monitors onto paper and were not connected. The vast amounts of data made it impossible to analyse them”, Felicitas Hanne, director of Kinderhaus AtemReich, explains.

This changed when Felicitas Hanne met Ana Campos, Co-CEO of Trivadis, in early 2019. “My brother is also severely restricted due to medical needs, so I was very moved by the story of the children at AtemReich. I immediately asked myself: Isn’t there a way we can help these children through technology?”, Campos explains. Trivadis made the decision to help Kinderhaus AtemReich with gathering and evaluating its data.

There is an IT company that has nothing to do with children needing artificial respiration, and they’ve made it their mission to support Kinderhaus AtemReich. This shows that even people who previously might have thought that they had nothing in common can make a real change in the world together.

Felicitas Hanne, Director, Kinderhaus AtemReich

Together with Felicitas Hanne, care workers, doctors and medical device manufacturers, Trivadis developed a cloud-based solution that connects the nursing records and the medical devices as well as their data and makes them available centrally for long-term analyses. An AI algorithm will also make it possible to analyse the data and recognize irregularities in the vital signs early on. Maxi has already benefited from this solution. “Maxi often had aggressive phases in which he would hurt himself and we were unable to get through to him. We had no idea what was causing it”, Felicitas Hanne explains. An analysis of his vital signs showed that Maxi’s aggressive phases might have been caused by too high a dose of his medication. “The increase in the dosage was so small that we did not even think about it – until we saw the connection black on white in front of us”, says Felicitas Hanne. Maxi has been doing a lot better since the medication was adjusted.

Trivadis is continuing to work together with the care workers to improve and complete the solution. The solution is promising for all industries which work with data streams/sensor data (such as IoT) and which are interested in anomalies (industry, energy, automotive, ... ). The architecture concept would remain the same.

ABOUT KINDERHAUS ATEMREICH

Moving or walking independently, expressing needs or breathing independently are either not or only partly possible for the children in the Kinderhaus AtemReich. To give these children a home, the children’s house AtemReich was founded in 2006. It is our mission to enable the children, despite their illness or handicap, to live normal, child-friendly and dignified lives. Parents and siblings of the children who live at the Kinderhaus AtemReich can be with their children at any time.

TECHNOLOGIES USED

Azure Data Bricks
Azure Data Factory GEN2
Azure Data Lake GEN1
Power BI

Azure SQL Database
Logic Apps
Azure Key Vault
Azure Event Hub

Azure Functions
Azure Machine Learning
Azure Monitor
Azure Web App