Data Modeling for Ambient Home Care Systems

Ambient assisted living (AAL) services are usually designed to work on the assumption that real-time context information about the user and his environment is available. Systems handling acquisition and context inference need to use a versatile data model, expressive and scalable enough to handle complex context and heterogeneous data sources. In this paper, we describe an ontology to be used in a system providing AAL services. The ontology reuses previous ontologies and models the partners in the value chain and their service offering. With our proposal, we aim at having an effective AAL data model, easily adaptable to specific domain needs and services

Development HealthCare System of Smart Hospital Based on UML and XML

The convergence of information technology systems in health care system building is causing us to look at more effective integration of technologies. Facing increased competition, tighter spaces, staff retention and reduced reimbursement, today’s traditional hospitals are looking at strategic ways to use technology to manage their systems called smart hospital. The concept of the smart hospital is a useful system for any hospital; about adding intelligence to the traditional hospital system by covering all resources and locations with patient information. Patient’s information is an important component of the patient privacy in any health care system that is based on the overall quality of each patient in the health care system. The main commitment for any health care system is to improve the quality of the patient and privacy of patient’s information. Today, there is a need of such computer environment where treatment to patients can be given on the basis of his/her previous medical history at the time of emergency at any time, on any place and anywhere. Pervasive and ubiquitous environment and UML (unified modeling language) can bring the boon in this field. For this it's needed to develop the ubiquitous health care computing environment using the UML with traditional hospital environment. This paper is based on the ubiquitous and pervasive computing environment based on UML and XML(The Extensible Markup Language)  technology, in which these problems has been tried to improve traditional hospital system into smart hospital in the near future. The key solution of the smart hospital is online identification of all patients, doctors, nurses, staff, medical equipments, medications, blood bags, surgical tools, blankets, sheets, hospital rooms, etc. In this paper efforts is channeled into improving the knowledge-base ontological description for smart hospital system by using UML and XML technology, Our knowledge is represented in XML format from UML modeling(class diagram). Our smart hospital provides access to its system by using a smart card. Finally, the former try to improve health care delivery through development and management of acute care hospital designed; both physically and operationally, for more efficiency and increased patients safety. Keywords: UML; Smart Hospital (SH); Ontology; XML; health care system

An ontology co-design method for the co-creation of a continuous care ontology

Ontology engineering methodologies tend to emphasize the role of the knowledge engineer or require a very active role of domain experts. In this paper, a participatory ontology engineering method is described that holds the middle ground between these two 'extremes'. After thorough ethnographic research, an interdisciplinary group of domain experts closely interacted with ontology engineers and social scientists in a series of workshops. Once a preliminary ontology was developed, a dynamic care request system was built using the ontology. Additional workshops were organized involving a broader group of domain experts to ensure the applicability of the ontology across continuous care settings. The proposed method successfully actively engaged domain experts in constructing the ontology, without overburdening them. Its applicability is illustrated by presenting the co-created continuous care ontology. The lessons learned during the design and execution of the approach are also presented

Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination

Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data. Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability. Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered. Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results