Partner interview: Stephan Kiefer of Fraunhofer IBMT

What is your name, position, and where do you work?

My name is Stephan Kiefer and I am working as a computer scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering in St. Ingbert, Germany, where I manage the Intelligent Health Information Systems group.

Where were you based prior to working here?

I joined Fraunhofer when I was a student. I love being able to do research and development (R&D) in the biomedical domain in interdisciplinary and international teams. I have been working for 25 years now here in various positions and R&D areas.

What is your role and what work do you do within the iManageCancer project?

I am the coordinator of the iManageCancer project and my job is to ensure that we achieve our ambitious goals in this endeavor. This is quite an easy task as I have a fantastic team, so I can focus in this initial phase of the project on discussing and elaborating details of our innovative iManageCancer services with the clinical partners and the software developers and on establishing contacts with external key players in order to install a network of supporters and promotors of our initiative.

How does your work relate to the work of other partners?

As the coordinator I interact with all partners with the aim to maintain a continuous dialogue between all partners and team members and to ensure that the different pieces of work fit together.

What do you think the biggest challenges will be for your work throughout the project?

A general challenge will be to deliver apps for personal health management and empowerment that are really useful to patients with cancer diseases and their relatives. No doubt, the project will provide such tools.

But for their success and acceptance by patients it will be extremely important that they are easy to use, self-explanatory, provide an obvious benefit to the patients and do not pose an additional burden to them. This requires intensive interaction with software developers and clinicians and involvement of patients during the development. A further challenge is to implement our exploitation plan with the aim to ensure that the tools and services of the iManageCancer platform will be available to the public after the end of the project.

What do you expect will be one of the most interesting things to come out the project once it has finished?

I expect that we will provide a clinical validated mHealth platform with services that really support cancer patients and their families to manage their disease and their therapies, to discuss and make decisions on their treatment with their doctors, to monitor their health status and to cope with the psycho-emotional stress of having cancer.