Context Aware Pervasive Healthcare System for HIV/AIDS Patients (CAPHS)
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Date
2011-11
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Addis Ababa,University
Abstract
These days, hea hhcare services are enjoying the applicat ion of pervasive computing systems.
Advances in wireless tec hnologies- such as intelli gent mobile devices and wearable networks
can improve communication among patients. physicians, and other healthcare workers as well as
enable the delivery of accurate medical information anytime anywhere, thereby reducing errors
and improving access. However, transmiss ion of vital signs, frequency of tran smi ssion of vital
sign s, network communication cost, context refinement, and management of large contexts are
still problems of pervasive hcalthcare systems. In this work, we propose a co ntext aware
pervasive healthcare system for HIV!AIDS (I-Iuman Immunode ficiency Virus! Acq uired
Immunodeficiency Syndrome) patients (CAPHS). The architecture of the system consists of
three constituents: the patient unit, the healthcare unit and the doctor/nurse un it. The pati ent unit
consists ofa group of body sensors for detectin g vital signs data from patients and transmitting it
to the patient's smart phone via Bluetooth. After preprocessing, the smart phone transmits vi tal
signs context information to the heahhcare un it via Internet for further processing and reason ing
if there is any abnorma lity. This preprocessing helps to determine the frequency of transmi ssion
of vital signs and reduces the network communicat ion cost to transmit vital sign data. At the
same tim e, it a lso increases the effic iency of the healthcarc unit because this operation reduces its
task of context refinement. The hea lthcare unit is rich in ART (Antiretroviral Thera py) ontology
knowledge that we developed. For better management of large contexts, we usc a hybrid context
management approach in which the high level schema ontology stored in OWLlRDF (Web
Ontology La nguage/Resource Description Framework) format and the ontology in stances stored
in ordinal)' relational databa se. The doctor/nurse unit is the thinnest of all units in terms of
number of components. It communicates with the health care unit via InternetiSMS so that
physicians can remotely monitor their pat ient. We have developed a prototype implementation
for the system and we see that it is promising.
Description
Keywords
Pervasive Heal thcare, Context Awareness, Ontology, ART, CAPHS.