Reasoning with Contextual Data in Telehealth Applications

Abstract

The notion of context-awareness is making its way in the area of mobile-health application designed to assist patients outside a hospital and medical professionals within a hospital. Such ubiquitous computing applications go beyond simple biomedical data-collection so the management of the context becomes more challenging, and the complexity of the context-based decision-algorithms warrants the use of full-blown inference engines. The context is a very volatile notion, so building a context-aware system means more than just creating a context ontology and defining inference rules for that model. This paper proposes mechanisms to dynamically manage the contextual decisions and actions. It devises a model and its properties for the process of taking each individual context-based decision. An architecture centered around this model is defined, integrating an off-the-shelf inference engine that reasons on context-data expressed in the OWL language.The architecture was refined and validated through the implementation of a prototype remote biomonitoring system. The prototype combines context-adaptation and awareness with the ubiquity of 3G network-coverage to allow for more personalized monitoring and better streamlining of information between the various health care players. It can be easily adapted and extended with extra inference-rules, additional actions, and more context items.

Future of Healthcare—Sensor Data-Driven Prognosis

“…Kara and Dragoi, in [27], have argued that context is volatile in nature, and to make diagnostic systems context-aware, decisions and actions must happen dynamically, periodically and on-demand. Thus, it is imperative that in order to become successful, knowledge-based expert systems must also offer contextual interpretation of pathophysiological data.…”

Big Data Analytics for Healthcare

“…On the other side there are many challenges within the healthcare systems such as network bandwidth, scalability, and cost that have stalled the widespread adoption of such streaming data collection [82][83][84]. This has allowed way for system-wide projects which especially cater to medical research communities [77,79,80,[85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93].…”

Survey of Context Provisioning Middleware

“…In these communities a large set of application domains benefiting from contextual awareness has been proposed. Use cases of high potential include health care and well-being [3], e-learning and campus life [4], tourism and travelling [5], office and other business applications [6], advertising and ecommerce [7], entertainment [8], gaming [9] and social community applications [10]. Moreover, smart places -an emerging research field in itself -heavily rely on context-awareness.…”