Abstract
BackgroundThe ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e.g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate.The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data.MethodsThe developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability.ResultsA prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered.ConclusionsThe OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results.
Highlights
The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff
By using the Semantic Communication Bus (SCB), which only process one event at a time, filters can be defined to ensure that the application components only receive relevant context information
The SCB allows the composition of complex application components from a set of smaller application components, which perform specific reasoning tasks in parallel and forward their conclusions through the SCB
Summary
The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e.g., task management and alerting systems. The current institutional care settings contain numerous devices and applications to support caregivers in carrying out their everyday activities, e.g., electronic medical records or patient monitoring equipment. This high amount of technology further increases the complexity of these daily activities, because the caregivers are directly faced with often complex technologies [2]. Due to this inadequate integration of the available technology, as well as the large amount of data being generated by the devices and the heavy workload of staff members, it is not uncommon for important events to be missed, e.g., early indications of worsening condition of a patient
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