Asia Pacific ubiquitous Healthcare Research Centre (APuHC) is a UNSW Research Centre that has evolved from ongoing collaborative research led by A/Prof  Pradeep Ray (APuHC Director) with academics from UNSW faculties of Engineering, Medicine, the Australian School of Business and overseas organizations from North America, Europe, and Asia. APuHC is a part of an international ubiquitous Healthcare (u-Health) initiative led by A/Prof Pradeep Ray. APuHC nodes are being set up in a number of countries, such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, India and USA. This international consortium meets every year at the IEEE Healthcom conference. More details are available at www.ehealthcom.org.

APuHC ubiquitous Network Centre (u-NC) (being setup in collaboration with industry partners Netstar and CAL2CAL-USA) will model a nerve centre for u-Health intelligence, research and information dissemination, especially in the fast growing Asia-Pacific region in the context of major public health threats, such as pandemics and bioterrorism. APuHC is undertaking multidisciplinary research in aspects of ubiquitous (across countries and regions) healthcare including networking, applications, services, processes and governance.

The ageing population and increasing share of chronic illnesses in many countries in the world necessitates concentrated research on healthcare paradigms beyond the current hospital-centric healthcare focus. There is a need to exploit latest developments in information technology to harness the cost of healthcare in this situation. APuHC members are investigating the use of Ontology-Based Multi-Agent Systems to address chronic illnesses. Emerging service science approach is being used to address the problem of intelligent care (icare) using latest developments in information technology in collaboration with IBM and universities in Taiwan and USA. In addition, APuHC members have undertaken US$2million research in the assessment and evaluation of e-Health for Health Care Delivery as part of the WHO initiative across six developing countries including India and China.

The APuHC research (estimated budget of $3 million over three years) will be organized into the following programs

• Program 1. Cooperative Management & Semantic Interoperability Projects comprising three ongoing research projects funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC).
• Program 2. Service Level Management and iCare projects comprising two ongoing projects funded by Netstar, ARC and DEST
• Program 3. E-Health Assessment and surveillance projects comprising WHO/ITU-D projects and research funded by global bodies and industry ( e.g.,  CAL2CAL-USA).
• Program 4. Information Technology Infrastructure Biosecurity