Extended Hapicare: A telecare system with probabilistic diagnosis and self-adaptive treatment

Abstract

The massive growth of the population with chronic diseases calls for a telecare system to enhance their quality of life and reduce their treatment costs. Most of the current solutions depend on reliable data, deterministic rules, or the similarity of patients, while studies have shown otherwise. To this end, in this paper, we have extended our previous work on the Hapicare framework to integrate probabilistic diagnosis and self-adaptive treatment. Our new framework enables sensors’ datastream analysis and online decision-making. Its ontology-based reasoning uses Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) ontology to add contextual information to the collected data. Moreover, probabilistic reasoning is applied for diagnosis and screening to manage the uncertainty and unreliability of data as well as the indeterministic medical rules. The treatment system is designed to be modifiable by the experts and automatically adaptable to patients’ needs. The probabilistic diagnosis performance has been evaluated based on two public datasets regarding symptoms and risk factors of two chronic diseases: chronic kidney disease and dermatologic disease. The results show that our solution outperforms a classical classifier specifically when more than 40% of the data are missing. The proposed framework is also validated using four scenarios. The evaluation results demonstrate the ability of the proposed framework to help patients and doctors diagnose and treat medical conditions and episodes.