Analyzing medical contexts in ubiquitous computing home environments with denotational mathematics

Abstract

Home healthcare presents important advantages and benefits over traditional hospitalization, supported by the contemporary scientific and technological achievements. The ubiquitous computing paradigm is considered suitable to support nursing at home provided that the distributed computing devices participate in the commonly interpreted context. Wirelessly and ad-hoc connected large numbers of disseminated sensors and computing devices in the home environment present problems related to energy limitations and the patients' mobility resulting in the introduction of systemic complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. In addition, describing such a system with analytical mathematics requires and includes extensive details becoming tedious if not impractical. Denotational mathematics provides an alternative formal methodological framework capable to describe the important components, the operation, and the behavior of such complicated systems. With the employment of denotational mathematics an attempt is made to design a system that develops medically valid contextual contents to support patients hospitalized at home. The developed design provides the contents of the medical context enriched by the rules of the current state of medical knowledge. The technically evolved context is compared against predetermined medical contexts to obtain valid interpretation. The presented design has the ambition to support efficiently the cooperation of the discrete software applications looking for the development of a commonly interpreted medical context at home.