Abstract
In recent years, telehealthcare systems (TSs) have become more and more widespread, as they can contribute to promoting the continuity of care and managing chronic conditions efficiently. Most TSs and nutrition recommendation systems require much information to return appropriate suggestions. This work proposes an ontology-based TS, namely HeNuALs, aimed at fostering a healthy diet and an active lifestyle in older adults with chronic pathologies. The system is built on the formalization of users’ health conditions, which can be obtained by leveraging existing standards. This allows for modeling different pathologies via reusable knowledge, thus limiting the amount of information needed to retrieve nutritional indications from the system. HeNuALs is composed of (1) an ontological layer that stores patients and their data, food and its characteristics, and physical activity-related data, enabling the inference a series of suggestions based on the effects of foods and exercises on specific health conditions; (2) two applications that allow both the patient and the clinicians to access the data (with different permissions) stored in the ontological layer; and (3) a series of wearable sensors that can be used to monitor physical exercise (provided by the patient application) and to ensure patients’ safety. HeNuALs inferences have been validated considering two different use cases. The system revealed the ability to determine suggestions for healthy, adequate, or unhealthy dishes for a patient with respiratory disease and for a patient with diabetes mellitus. Future work foresees the extension of the HeNuALs knowledge base by exploiting automatic knowledge retrieval approaches and validation of the whole system with target users.
Highlights
Telehealthcare systems (TSs) exploit information and communications technologies to provide clinical services remotely, and their advantages have been described in several works since the early 2000s
Adopts more than 1400 categories, each representing either a domain of the body (Body functions and Body structure chapters), the environment (Environmental factors chapter), or a combination of both (Activities and participation chapter), to be evaluated under the functional point of view. Due to their diffusion among health stakeholders, both classifications have been represented into two ontologies, of which this module reuses some chapters and their related categories (5: Endocrine, nutritional and metabolic disorders; 12: Diseases of the respiratory system; 13: Diseases of the digestive system for the ICD; and all of the Body functions and Body structures chapters for the ICF). This module associates to each health condition relevant information like henuals:bodyWeight, henuals:height, henuals:BMI, and physical exercises that are recommended by the clinicians to the patient
Using the SWRL, the HeNuALs ontology layer is able to draw general inferences to help clinicians determine food recommendations based on the effects of foods on specific health conditions and patients to support the implementation of a healthy diet plan [56]
Summary
Telehealthcare systems (TSs) exploit information and communications technologies to provide clinical services remotely, and their advantages have been described in several works since the early 2000s. AI technologies can exploit monotonic reasoning techniques and rules, enabling the elicitation of new pieces of information This work exploits such advantages of semantics to devise the architecture of a prototypical TS named “Health and Nutrition Active Lifestyle” (HeNuALs), aimed at fostering a healthy diet and an active lifestyle in older adults with chronic conditions by intervening in the “modifiable risk factors”. Both diet and an active lifestyle have been proven to be effective in reducing the effects of all those factors contributing to increased mortality rates and disease incidence among older adults [13].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call