Abstract
Every year the queues in hospitals publics and privates grows due to, among others, the increasing of the world population and the delay in the patients service. This is a serious problem faced by administrators of hospitals, which believe that it is increasingly difficult to offer a service of quality to those who search for them. One of the ways to decrease these queues is through the development of homecare systems that allow the patient to receive the clinic treatment directly in his house. The development of these kinds of systems would help to decrease the queues and consequently, would improve the attendance of those who goes to the hospitals looking for assistance. Considering this, this work has as main purpose to present the architecture modeling of a pervasive system to be applied in homecare environments. The pervasive systems developed from this modeling aim to improve the services provided by healthcare professionals in the treatment of patients that are located in their houses. The architecture proposed by the methodology uses concepts of pervasive computing to provide access to information any- time and wherever the user is, once that a homecare environment has a high level of dynamicity. The knowledge representation of the homecare environment needed in the modeling of the architecture is made through ontologies due to the possibility of reuse of the information stored, as well as the interoperability of information among different computational devices. To validate the proposed methodology, we present two use cases, which are also used to demonstrate the workflow of the pervasive system of homecare.
TopGassen et al. (2012) propose a methodology for home care systems, where non-health specialists could perform service orchestrations. They use ontologies to express the possibilities of modeling and provide the necessary semantic during the processes. With this they intend to personalize the process in the houses of patients, once this kind of environment may have a certain level of differences one from another.
Paganelli & Giuli (2011) describe a configurable and extensible service-oriented framework, aiming to facilitate the development of applications to assist patients with chronic conditions while they stay at home. The framework is composed by an ontology-based context model and a context aware system and is part of a platform of homecare services aiming the sharing of information, organizing actions to be taken in critical situations. The work developed by Evchina et al. (2012) aims to find a easy way to manage a smart home, once this kind of environment may become very complex, with different types of information being requested at the same time by the system.
Key Terms in this Chapter
OWL: The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages or ontology languages for authoring ontologies or knowledge bases. The languages are characterized by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web. OWL is endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and has attracted academic, medical and commercial interest.
Home Care: It is supportive care provided in the home. Licensed healthcare professionals who provide medical care needs or by professional caregivers who provide daily care to help to ensure the activities of daily living are met may provide care. In home medical care is often and more accurately referred to as home health care or formal care.
Protégé: It is a free, open source ontology editor and a knowledge acquisition system. Protégé is a framework for which various other projects suggest plugins. This application is written in Java and heavily uses Swing to create the rather complex user interface.
XML: Extensible Markup Language is a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web, intranets, and elsewhere. For example, computer makers might agree on a standard or common way to describe the information about a computer product (processor speed, memory size, and so forth) and then describe the product information format with XML.
Pervasive Computing: It goes beyond the realm of personal computers. It is the idea that almost any device can be imbedded with chips to connect the device to an infinite network of other devices. The goal of pervasive computing, which combines current network technologies with wireless computing, voice recognition, Internet capability and artificial intelligence, is to create an environment where the connectivity of devices is embedded in such a way that the connectivity is unobtrusive and always available.
Ontology: It is a specification of a conceptualization. Ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. This definition is consistent with the usage of ontology as set-of-concept-definitions, but more general.
SWRL: It includes a high-level abstract syntax for Horn-like rules in both the OWL DL and OWL Lite sublanguages of OWL. A model-theoretic semantics is given to provide the formal meaning for OWL ontologies including rules written in this abstract syntax.