Enhancing eHealth Information Systems for chronic diseases remote monitoring systems

Abstract

Statistics and demographics for the aging population in Europe are compelling. The stakes are then in terms of disability and chronic diseases whose proportions will increase because of increased life expectancy. Heart failure (HF), a serious chronic disease, induces frequent re-hospitalizations, some of which can be prevented by up-stream actions. Managing HF is quite a complex process: long, often difficult and expensive. In France, nearly one million people suffer from HF and 120,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. Managing such patients, a telemedicine system tools associated with motivation and education can significantly reduce the number of hospital days that believes therefore that the patient is hospitalized for acute HF. The current development projects are fully in prevention, human security, and remote monitoring of people in their living day-to-day spaces, from the perspective of health and wellness. These projects encompass gathering, organizing, structuring and sharing medical information. They also have to take into account the main aspects of interoperability. A different approach has been used to capitalize on such information: data warehouse approach, mediation approach (or integration by views) or integration approach by link (or so-called mashup). In this paper, we will focus on ontologies that take a central place in the Semantic Web: on one hand, they rely on modeling from conceptual representations of the areas concerned and, on the other hand, they allow programs to make inferences over them.