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Continuous care models for chronic diseases pose several technology-oriented challenges for home-based care, where assistance services rely on a close collaboration among different stakeholders, such as health operators, patient relatives, and social community members. This paper describes an ontology-based context model and a related context management system providing a configurable and extensible service-oriented framework to ease the development of applications for monitoring and handling patient chronic conditions. The system has been developed in a prototypal version, and integrated with a service platform for supporting operators of home-based care networks in cooperating and sharing patient-related information and coordinating mutual interventions for handling critical and alarm situations. Finally, we discuss experimentation results and possible further research directions.

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The Web of Things is as an active research field which aims at promoting the easy access and handling of smart things' digital representations through the adoption of Web standards and technologies. While huge research and development efforts have been spent on lower-level networks and software technologies, it has been recognized that little experience exists instead in modeling and building applications for the Web of Things. Although several works have proposed REST-inspired approaches for the Web of Things, a main limitation is that poor support is provided to web developers for speeding up the development of Web of Things applications, while taking full advantage of REST benefits. In this work we propose a framework which supports developers in modeling smart things as web resources, exposing them through RESTful APIs, and developing applications on top of them. The framework consists of a Web Resource information model, a middleware and tools for developing and publishing smart things' digital representations on the Web. We discuss main framework implementation choices and its compliance with REST guidelines. Finally, we report on our test activities carried out within the SmartSantander European Project to evaluate the use and proficiency of our framework in a smart city scenario.

New care models have been defined in order to manage the increasing impact of chronic conditions. These models pose several technology-oriented challenges for home-based continuous care, requiring assistance services based on collaboration among different stakeholders: health operators, patient relatives, as well as social community members. This work describes an ontology-based context model and a related context management middleware providing a reusable and extensible application framework for monitoring and assisting patients at home. It provides flexible instruments for patient health status and social context representation, as well as reasoning mechanisms for alarm situation handling.