Ubiquitous Healthcare Utilizing Semantic Interoperability

2012

In the time where the digital world is moving to mobile devices, new opportunities are emerging for the e-health systems. We live in the time when data are stored in different databases and different ways. This imposed the use of ontologies to resolve interoperability issues. Ontologies can be used for automation of e-health system data flow, enabling automated responses in real time to patient data entered into the medical record from Physicians and hospitals, and by offering caregivers evidence-based, best-practice information about how to act in emergency or nonemergency situations. Mobile e-health semantic systems help Physicians tracking better the health of their patients, avoid mistakes and act faster in emergency situations Semantic technology and database technology in combination with mobile devices together make a combined information system which will revolutionize the way how today’s health institutions treat their patients.

Case Studies and Applications, 2010

The future of computing has been painted by many visionaries. It was coined as ubiquitous computing by Mark Weiser; D.A. Norman introduced invisible computing, IBM promotes pervasive computing; Sybase calls it mobile embedded computing; and Sun uses the term Post-PC era (Milojicic et al., 2001). Each one perceives differently this new technologi-cal region and as a result focuses on a different aspect of it. The prevailing name is ubiquitous computing even if pervasive computing is also used alternately. A common feature of all these diverse approaches though is the center of gravity is moving now from technology to users and services (Milojicic et al., 2001). All promote the current trend through which communication systems and their components are built aiming to offer services based on the analysis of the context of their users and adapt to the specific preferences of each user. Adaptation is further done

Iet Communications, 2008

As a response to the challenge of providing high-quality healthcare services with reasonable costs while the elderly population and the associated chronic diseases increase, SAPHIRE architecture provides an intelligent healthcare monitoring architecture. The monitoring of patients is achieved through a clinical decision support system based on clinical guidelines. SAPHIRE provides the necessary interoperability layers to access the patient's vital signs from wireless medical sensors and the electronic healthcare records of the patient in order to exploit them in the decision process seamlessly. This architecture is presented through two pilot applications: one for the bedside monitoring of cardiac patients at hospitals, and the other for homecare monitoring of the cardiac patients rehabilitated after a revascularisation therapy.

ACIS 2014: Integral IS: The Embedding of Information Systems in Business, Government and Society, 2014

In the current quest for personalized and omnipresent healthcare required to address new emerging population health challenges, the localised, legacy concept of healthcare information systems is no longer expressive enough to address the complex interrelationships of the increasingly diversified technical environment in which the clinical processes occur. Thus, traditionally healthcare information systems architecture considered only clinical information systems and healthcare facilities; however, as the Internet-of-Things vision becomes a reality, an exponential number of mobile devices, sensors, tags and other identifiable resources with communication and processing capabilities will need to be added to the big picture. In such complex circumstances, the concept of interoperability also needs to evolve from the original concept involving pre-committed information systems to the capability of each information system to autonomously sense, interpret, understand and act upon arbitrary messages received from potentially unknown senders. Therefore, in this paper we propose an evolved concept of interoperability as a property of a system, more suitable to tackle the modern context of ubiquitous healthcare information systems. After defining the new problems faced by healthcare and concise review of the ubiquitous computing in the domain, we elaborate on the enabling factors for interoperable information systems involved in pervasive healthcare. Subsequently we attempt to assess and exemplify the impact that a novel Interoperability as a Property (IaaP) paradigm would have on the healthcare information systems' landscape.

International Transactions on Systems Science and Applications, 2006

This paper investigates the feasibility of employing the Software Agent technology in the highly dynamic and variable context of healthcare emergency coordination and decision-support domain. We introduce the design of an agent-based middleware tailored to the requirements of such context and propose a framework, called UbiMedic, for the implementation and deployment of services, like monitoring services, communications and remote medical measurements in injured people. From the analysis of the framework, we are able to identify some of the major technical requirements it should meet as well as challenges to be addressed for effective use in commercial applications. We choose software agents as the key enabling technology because they offer a single, general framework in which large-scale, distributed real-time decision-support applications can be implemented more efficiently.

International Journal of Computer Applications, 2018

In this paper, discuss the semantic concept, where it found to enrich the logically and conveniently of information accessed capability through web services doing by human or automated using tools. The semantic potentials were based on schemes and formats of data integrated and shared among web, these formats and schemes called ontologies. This technology provides interoperability between medical IoT devices in the healthcare system. The aim of this paper is the effort to developing a framework for e-healthcare applications using the semantic Internet of Things. Extend these ontology descriptions toward the specificity of the healthcare domain. It is to design and implement a framework that holds healthcare data to be then easily used by e-healthcare applications by mapping data into the ontology entities and properties. The objectives of the e-health ontology are to increase access to health care for patients in remote areas, to improve quality of care for patients.

The need of having a more preventive, personalized and anticipatory healthcare for chronically ill patients entails a continuous provisioning of health services everywhere, anytime and to anyone. The ubiquitous computing paradigm is an approach to realize this vision. Nevertheless, the use of all potential ubiquitous health services and contextual information is quite limited in the literature. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a semantic framework for continuous ubiquitous services provisioning. Patients needs are represented in business processes. Also, this paper proposes a semantic description model of processes, services, as well as medical and environmental contextual information, in order to make it easier to select appropriate services out of semantically selected business processes. The suitability of the framework is evaluated through a case study for respiratory chronic disease, by making use of real patient data and health professionals from a public pediatric hospital.

IEEE Access

In the era of smart devices and connected neighborhoods, the ubiquitous monitoring and care of patients are possible with the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Smart healthcare devices may serve their purpose well when they are able to share patient's data with each other. However, data formats vary widely across vendors, rendering these devices not interoperable. Recent solutions mostly rely on cloud services where a source device uploads the data, and the sink devices download it conforming to their own native formats. However, the quality of service is expected to deteriorate in a cloud processing regime with inherent network delays and traffic congestion, and the real-time data acquisition and manipulation is, therefore, not possible. This article presents MeDIC, a framework of Medical Data Interoperability through Collaboration of healthcare devices. MeDIC improves over a cloud-based IoMT by utilizing translation resources at the network edge, with its probing and translating agents. The probing agents maintain a capability list of MeDIC devices within a local network and enable one MeDIC device to request data conversion from another device when the former is not capable of this conversion by itself. The translating agent of the later then converts the data into the required format and returns it to the former. These novel agents allow IoMT devices to share their redundant computing resources for data translations in order to minimize cloud accesses. Legacy devices are supported through MeDIC-enabled, fog resource managers. We evaluate MeDIC in four use cases with rigorous simulations, which prove that this collaborative framework not only reduces the uplink traffic but also improves the response time, which is critical in real-time medical applications.

The Ubiquity 2.0 Trend and Beyond, 2010

Canada lags other nations in the introduction and use of the electronic medical record (EMR) and the electronic health record (EHR). Progress is slow and Canada ranks last in EMR adoption compared to many other countries (Davis, Doty, Shea, & Stremikis, 2009). Two primary reasons for the lack of progress are a slow rate of adoption

International journal of telemedicine and applications, 2011

The need for high-quality out-of-hospital healthcare is a known socioeconomic problem. Exploiting ICT's evolution, ad-hoc telemedicine solutions have been proposed in the past. Integrating such ad-hoc solutions in order to cost-effectively support the entire healthcare cycle is still a research challenge. In order to handle the heterogeneity of relevant information and to overcome the fragmentation of out-of-hospital instrumentation in person-centric healthcare systems, a shared and open source interoperability component can be adopted, which is ontology driven and based on the semantic web data model. The feasibility and the advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by presenting the use case of real-time monitoring of patients' health and their environmental context.