The OCareCloudS project: toward organizing care through trusted cloud services

The increasing elderly population and the shift from acute to chronic illness makes it difficult to care for people in hospitals and rest homes. Moreover, elderly people, if given a choice, want to stay at home as long as possible. In this article, the methodologies to develop a cloud-based semantic system, offering valuable information and knowledge-based services, are presented. The information and services are related to the different personal living hemispheres of the patient, namely the daily care-related needs, the social needs and the daily life assistance. Ontologies are used to facilitate the integration, analysis, aggregation and efficient use of all the available data in the cloud. By using an interdisciplinary research approach, where user researchers, (ontology) engineers, researchers and domain stakeholders are at the forefront, a platform can be developed of great added value for the patients that want to grow old in their own home and for their caregivers

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

Interconnecting IoT devices to improve the QoL of elderly people

Es un borrador de: Flores-Martin, D., Pérez-Vereda, A., Berrocal, J., Canal, C., & Murillo, J. M. (2020). Interconnecting IoT Devices to Improve the QoL of Elderly People. In Mendes, D., Fonseca, C., Lopes, M. J., García-Alonso, J., & Murillo, J. M. (Ed.), Exploring the Role of ICTs in Healthy Aging (pp. 148-165). IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-1937-0.ch009The rate at which the Internet is growing is unstoppable due to the large number of connected smart devices. Manufacturers often develop specific protocols for their own devices that do not usually follow any standards. This hinders the interconnection and coordination of devices from different manufacturers, limiting the number of daily activities that can be supported. Some works are proposing different techniques to reduce this barrier and avoid the vendor lock-in issue. Nevertheless, this interconnection should also depends on the context. In this chapter, the authors propose a system to dynamically identify the interconnections required each specific situation depending on the context. This proposal has been tested in case studies focused in elderly people with the aim of automating their daily tasks and improving their quality of life. Further, in a world with an accelerated population aging, there is an increasing interest on developing solutions for the elderly living assistance through IoT systems.This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and by 4IE project (0045-4IE-4-P) funded by the Interreg V-A España-Portugal (POCTEP) 2014-2020 program, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through project RTI2018-094591-B-I00 (MINECO/FEDER, UE) and by the Department of Economy and Infrastructure of the Government of Extremadura (GR18112, IB18030)

SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW: DATA STANDARDIZATION IN HEALTH INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Digitalization within the healthcare sector has resulted in the accumulation of vast amounts of data that can be utilized towards the improvement of health outcomes. Meaningful use of such data, however, requires that it is standardized. Standardization plays a key role in providing a universal language for data that is exchanged through different health systems. Through a systematic literature review, this paper identifies practices that are vital for an effective standardization process. Ontological development, governance and organizational practices are identified as pertinent to the process of standardization and are analyzed and explained through the lens of a multi-thread social activity model by Fomin et al. (2003). This model provides a comprehensive view of related aspects of design, sense-making, and negotiation. The analysis shows that all these aspects take place in all stages of the standardization process, and they are highly dependent on each other and can occur simultaneously