A Context Aware Framework for u-Healthcare in a Wearable System

Abstract

A wearable system can be a key system for u-Healthcare, which means healthcare services at any time and at any places. A wearable system for u-Healthcare is composed of three parts: wearable computers, wearable sensor systems, and communication modules. A middleware is required in order to send the information gathered from wearable sensors to u-Healthcare service entities. The middleware should handle the problem of interoperability between information from sensors and u-Healthcare service entities. We develop a context aware framework as the middleware between wearable sensor systems and u-Healthcare service entities. An ontology based context model is designed for interoperability between context providing modules and u-Healthcare service entities. By using the same context model and the same API’s of the context aware framework in programming both context providing modules and u-Healthcare service entities, contexts from sensors can be sent to u-Healthcare service entities without the interoperability problem. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed system, some application examples are given, which are applied to a remote monitoring, and a self check service.