Personalising Situated Workflow Systems for Pervasive Healthcare Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we present an approach where a workflow system is combined with a policy-based framework for the specification and enforcement of policies for healthcare applications. In our approach, workflows are used to capture entities' responsibilities and to assist entities in fulfilling them. The policy-based framework allows us to express authorisation policies to define the rights that entities have in the system, and event-condition-action (ECA) policies that are used to adapt the system to the actual situation. Authorisations will often depend on the context in which patients' care takes place, and our policies support predicates that reflect the environment. ECA policies capture events that reflect the current state of the environment and can perform actions to accordingly adapt the workflow execution. We show how the approach can be used for the Edema treatment and how fine-grained authorisation and ECA policies are expressed and used.