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

Knowledge-driven delivery of home care services

The version of record is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10844-010-0145-0Home Care (HC) assistance is emerging as an effective and efficient alternative to institutionalized care, especially for the case of senior patients that present multiple co-morbidities and require life long treatments under continuous supervision. The care of such patients requires the definition of specially tailored treatments and their delivery involves the coordination of a team of professionals from different institutions, requiring the management of many kinds of knowledge (medical, organizational, social and procedural). The K4Care project aims to assist the HC of elderly patients by proposing a standard HC model and implementing it in a knowledge-driven e-health platform aimed to support the provision of HC services.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

E-HEALTH SERVICES IN HL7 STANDARD

Abstract: Health care is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Health care is delivered by practitioners in medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and other care providers. E-Health tools allow the construction of patientcentric Healthcare Service Providers that aim to support patients to access health related information, to prevent their possible diseases and to monitor their health status. The system builds a profile for each patient and uses it to detect Healthcare Service Providers delivering E-Health services potentially capable of satisfying the patient needs. The proposed system is HL7-aware represents both patient and service information according to the directives of HL7, the information management standard adopted in medical context. Once patients submit a query the proposed system retrieves a set of relevant services which satisfy the need of the patient. However EHealth is evolving into entities such as mobile health which focus on providing healthcare to people anywhere, anytime using broadband and wireless mobile technologies

Report III on Knowledge-based Mining of Complex Event Patterns: Complex Event Extraction from Real-Time News Streams

In this report, we present our research results during the fourth half-year- phase of the project Corporate Smart Content under the working package ”Knowledge-based Mining of Complex Event Patterns”. We present here a novel approach for real-time extraction of news, based on user specifications and by using background knowledge from specific news domains. We create a powerful filtering service which limits the news data to the concrete and essential preferences of a user. In our approach, enrichment of real- time news with background knowledge is a preprocessing step. We use a Complex Event Processor to detect complex events from the enriched articles and match them to the user specified query. Each time a news article is matched, its result is notified to the user immediately. Our experimental evaluation shows that our approach is feasible for detecting news in real- time with high precision and recall

Inter-organizational information sharing of customer data in retail

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-53).As massive online retailers are putting increasing pressure on the traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, new ways to compete for customers is needed. Identifying customers' behavior and understanding their needs could be a crucial way for firms to improve their competitive advantage. One way to better understand customers could be for retailers to collaborate and aggregate their customer data in order to gain more holistic understandings of customers. This thesis examines on a high-level how customer data is used in retail today and what new value can be generated by collaborating and aggregating customer data, both for businesses as well as for consumers. It then goes on to identify structures of customer data sharing that we observe today and what the underlying factors are for each structure. By projecting how these factors will evolve over time, different scenarios are drawn up of what we might expect to see in the retail industry in the future in terms of customer data sharing. The implications of those projections could possibly open up for new business opportunities, both for entrepreneurs as well as incumbent retailers.by John C.F. Tengberg.S.M

International Market Segmentation across Consumption and Communication Categories: Identity, Demographics, and Consumer Decisions and Online Habits

In this chapter we will discuss the different approaches to market segmentation and selection and explore how the selection process influences the company’s culture, its brand positioning, and how it is impacted upon by the overall marketing and communication strategy and vice versa. Some questions this chapter considers and discusses are: Which segments should firms’ international marketing activities (including financial, human resources, and the firm’s capabilities) focus on? How do multinationals decide if segmentation efforts are effective? Finally, we will explore how organizations1 can monitor and control the various activities and outcomes, in order to ensure sustainable competitive advantage(s) in a highly competitive marketplace and online marketspace