Economic viability of eCare solutions

Provisioning of good quality care to the elderly population and at the same time reducing the pressure on the health care expenditures is a challenging issue for governments today. Many ICT supported, distant care systems (eCare) have been proposed but few have found their way to the market. The problem is to provide a viable business case for each actor involved (including eCare platform, health care and finance providers) when offering eCare services. We have constructed a model for evaluating the (socio-)economic viability of different business models when introducing eCare solutions. A multi-actor approach has been implemented, calculating and evaluating the business case for each actor involved. For a Belgian case we will show (socio)-economic advantages to participate in an eCare ecosystem

Participatory design of a continuous care ontology : towards a user-driven ontology engineering methodology

The patient room of the future would be able to sense the needs and preferences of the patients and nurses and adapt itself accordingly by combining all the heterogeneous data offered by the different technologies. This goal can be achieved by developing a context-aware framework, which exploits and integrates the heterogeneous data by utilizing a continuous care ontology. The existing ontology engineering methodologies are rather extreme in their choices to include domain experts. On the one hand, there are methodologies that only discuss the scope, use and requirements of the ontology with the domain experts. On the other hand, there are approaches in which the ontology is completely constructed by the domain experts by providing them with user-friendly and collaborative tools. In this paper, a participatory ontology engineering methodology is presented that finds a middle ground between these two extremes. The methodology actively involves social scientists, ontology engineers and stakeholders. The stakeholders participate in each step of the ontology life cycle without having to construct the ontology themselves or attribute a large amount of their time. The applicability of the methodology is illustrated by presenting the co-created continuous care ontology

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