23,250 research outputs found

    Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination

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    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

    Semantic-based decision support for remote care of dementia patients

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    This paper investigates the challenges in developing a semantic-based Dementia Care Decision Support System based on the non-intrusive monitoring of the patient's behaviour. Semantic-based approaches are well suited for modelling context-aware scenarios similar to Dementia care systems, where the patient's dynamic behaviour observations (occupants movement, equipment use) need to be analysed against the semantic knowledge about the patient's condition (illness history, medical advice, known symptoms) in an integrated knowledgebase. However, our research findings establish that the ability of semantic technologies to reason upon the complex interrelated events emanating from the behaviour monitoring sensors to infer knowledge assisting medical advice represents a major challenge. We attempt to address this problem by introducing a new approach that relies on propositional calculus modelling to segregate complex events that are amenable for semantic reasoning from events that require pre-processing outside the semantic engine before they can be reasoned upon. The event pre-processing activity also controls the timing of triggering the reasoning process in order to further improve the efficiency of the inference process. Using regression analysis, we evaluate the response-time as the number of monitored patients increases and conclude that the incurred overhead on the response time of the prototype decision support systems remains tolerable

    Monitoring and detection of agitation in dementia: towards real-time and big-data solutions

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    The changing demographic profile of the population has potentially challenging social, geopolitical, and financial consequences for individuals, families, the wider society, and governments globally. The demographic change will result in a rapidly growing elderly population with healthcare implications which importantly include Alzheimer type conditions (a leading cause of dementia). Dementia requires long term care to manage the negative behavioral symptoms which are primarily exhibited in terms of agitation and aggression as the condition develops. This paper considers the nature of dementia along with the issues and challenges implicit in its management. The Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD) are introduced with factors (precursors) to the onset of agitation and aggression. Independent living is considered, health monitoring and implementation in context-aware decision-support systems is discussed with consideration of data analytics. Implicit in health monitoring are technical and ethical constraints, we briefly consider these constraints with the ability to generalize to a range of medical conditions. We postulate that health monitoring offers exciting potential opportunities however the challenges lie in the effective realization of independent assisted living while meeting the ethical challenges, achieving this remains an open research question remains.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

    Real-Time Physiological Simulation and Modeling toward Dependable Patient Monitoring Systems

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    We present a novel approach to describe dependability measures for intelligent patient monitoring devices. The strategy is based on using a combination of methods from system theory and real-time physiological simulations. For the first time not only the technical device but also the patient is taken into consideration. Including the patient requires prediction of physiology which is achieved by a real-time physiological simulation in a continuous time domain, whereby one of the main ingredients is a temporal reasoning element. The quality of the reasoning is expressed by a dependability analysis strategy. Thereby, anomalies are expressed as differences between simulation and real world data. Deviations are detected for current and they are forecasted for future points in time and can express critical situations. By this method, patient specific differences in terms of physiological reactions are described, allowing early detection of critical states

    Distributed System Contract Monitoring

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    The use of behavioural contracts, to specify, regulate and verify systems, is particularly relevant to runtime monitoring of distributed systems. System distribution poses major challenges to contract monitoring, from monitoring-induced information leaks to computation load balancing, communication overheads and fault-tolerance. We present mDPi, a location-aware process calculus, for reasoning about monitoring of distributed systems. We define a family of Labelled Transition Systems for this calculus, which allow formal reasoning about different monitoring strategies at different levels of abstractions. We also illustrate the expressivity of the calculus by showing how contracts in a simple contract language can be synthesised into different mDPi monitors.Comment: In Proceedings FLACOS 2011, arXiv:1109.239

    The implosion of reality: schizophrenia, the anterior cingular cortex and anticipation

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    In contemporary neuroscientific and psychiatric research into schizophrenia, we can observe a shift in focus from the clinical dysfunctions (positive and negative symptoms) towards a mapping of the cognitive function. In this paper we look at a specific cognitive problem area in schizophrenic brain functioning, the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC). We show what the ACC is, what it probably does and how this is relevant in research concerning certain psychiatric disorders. Then we explain the role of the ACC in choice anticipation. In this we underline the possible link between choice anticipation and the lack of ‘Error Related Negativity’ (ERN) in this specific area. Lastly we incorporate this approach to the problem of schizophrenic anticipation within the neuropsychoanalytical framework and the role it might play in the formation of hallucinations and delusion
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