Jesús Bermúdez

Real-Time Detection of Apneas on a PDA

Patients suspected of suffering sleep apnea and hypopnea syndrome (SAHS) have to undergo sleep studies such as expensive polysomnographies to be diagnosed. Healthcare professionals are constantly looking for ways to improve the ease of diagnosis and comfort for this kind of patients as well as reducing both the number of sleep studies they need to undergo and the waiting times. Relating to this scenario, some research proposals and commercial products are appearing, but all of them record the physiological data of patients to portable devices and, in the morning, these data are loaded into hospital computers where physicians analyze them by making use of specialized software. In this paper, we present an alternative proposal that promotes not only a transmission of physiological data but also a real-time analysis of these data locally at a mobile device. For that, we have built a classifier that provides an accuracy of 93% and a receiver operating characteristic-area under the curve (ROC-AUC) of 98.5% on SpO2 signals available in the annotated Apnea-ECG Database. This local analysis allows the detection of anomalous situations as soon as they are generated. The classifier has been implemented taking into consideration the restricted resources of mobile devices.

Toward Semantic Interoperability of Electronic Health Records

Although the goal of achieving semantic interoperability of electronic health records (EHRs) is pursued by many researchers, it has not been accomplished yet. In this paper, we present a proposal that smoothes out the way toward the achievement of that goal. In particular, our study focuses on medical diagnoses statements. In summary, the main contributions of our ontology-based proposal are the following: first, it includes a canonical ontology whose EHR-related terms focus on semantic aspects. As a result, their descriptions are independent of languages and technology aspects used in different organizations to represent EHRs. Moreover, those terms are related to their corresponding codes in well-known medical terminologies. Second, it deals with modules that allow obtaining rich ontological representations of EHR information managed by proprietary models of health information systems. The features of one specific module are shown as reference. Third, it considers the necessary mapping axioms between ontological terms enhanced with so-called path mappings. This feature smoothes out structural differences between heterogeneous EHR representations, allowing proper alignment of information.

Intelligent monitoring of elderly people

The aim of the article is to present our proposal for an intelligent monitoring of elderly people based on: agent technology, a decision support system implemented using a description logic based system and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Agent technology allows us to customize the monitoring service and to distribute the global functionality of the system among several agents. We use the DAML+OIL description logic based system to describe an ontology that categorizes different anomalous situations. The reasoning mechanism provided by that system permits the detection of anomalous situations for many different user conditions. Finally, the use of PDAs allows us to offer an anywhere and anytime monitoring.

An Innovative System that Runs on a PDA for a Continuous Monitoring of People

Continuous pervasive monitoring has the potential to improve the quality of life of many persons (for example those who suffer from heart arrhythmias or elderly people who suffer from chronic diseases). We show the three main steps related to the monitoring process and supported by our system. First, how data are captured by sensors which send those data using wireless communications to a PDA (personal digital assistant). Second, how data are analyzed, locally on the PDA, using techniques proposed in the areas of the semantic Web and machine learning. Finally, how data stored at the PDA can be queried remotely using Web services. Those three steps are illustrated in two different scenarios that the system can deal with: tele-assistance and monitoring of arrhythmias. Moreover, through the paper we highlight the main advantages provided by the system: active monitoring which consists in reacting to anomalous situations without direct intervention of the user; universal assistance, i.e. irrespective of time or place through the use of wireless communications and PDAs; vital signs monitoring which consists in using sensors that capture the value of those vital signs, and subsequently feed them to a decision support system that analyses them and generates an alarm if necessary; and remote monitoring which allows authorized personal to consult data on monitored patients, using the Internet. Finally we present some performance results which demonstrate the feasibility of the system

An intelligent system for assisting elderly people

In this paper we present the main features of a system that we have developed and that provides a new kind of tele-assistance service to elderly people.apart from the functionalities offered by the current tele-assistance services, also provides a high quality, anywhere and at any time assistance. We rate the assistance as high quality because allows the monitoring of vital signs and a local detection of anomalous situations by the device that the person carries in real time. Therefore, it sends alarms autonomously when necessary. Through this paper we explain the three main functionalities offered by AINGERU: universal assistance anywhere and at any time, monitoring of vital signs irrespective of location or time and remote monitoring by allowing authorized external persons to consult data about monitored persons using the Internet. Moreover we show how those functionalities are achieved by making use of PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), wireless communication, Semantic Web, Web services and agent technologies.

Using Ontologies in the Development of an Innovating System for Elderly People Tele-assistance

We have used most recent advances in the fields of artificial intelligence (knowledge representation), mobile computing and networking to develop the AINGERU system that provides a new kind of tele-assistance service for elderly people. The new features incorporated over the traditional tele-assistance are: high quality monitoring, anywhere and anytime. In this paper we focus on the high quality aspect and, more precisely, we present the role that two specific ontologies play and the advantages that they provide to the system. One ontology describes domain knowledge and the other one describes the operational model of the system.

Architecture, cost-model and customization of real-time monitoring systems based on mobile biological sensor data-streams

Innovation in the fields of wireless data communications, mobile devices and biosensor technology enables the development of new types of monitoring systems that provide people with assistance anywhere and at any time. In this paper we present an architecture useful to build those kind of systems that monitor data streams generated by biological sensors attached to mobile users. We pay special attention to three aspects related to the system efficiency: selection of the optimal granularity, that is, the selection of the size of the input data stream package that has to be acquired in order to start a new processing cycle; the possible use of compression techniques to store and send the acquired input data stream and; finally, the performance of a local analysis versus a remote one. Moreover, we introduce two particular real systems to illustrate the suitability and applicability of our proposal: an anywhere and at any time monitoring system of heart arrhythmias and an apnea monitoring system.

Semantic web technology for agent communication protocols

One relevant aspect in the development of the Semantic Web framework is the achievement of a real inter-agents communication capability at the semantic level. The agents should be able to communicate and understand each other using standard communication protocols freely, that is, without needing a laborious a priori preparation, before the communication takes place. For that setting we present in this paper a proposal that promotes to describe standard communication protocols using SemanticWeb technology (specifically, OWL-DL and SWRL). Those protocols are constituted by communication acts. In our proposal those communication acts are described as terms that belong to a communication acts ontology, that we have developed, called COMMONT. The intended semantics associated to the communication acts in the ontology is expressed through social commitments that are formalized as fluents in the Event Calculus. In summary, OWL-DL reasoners and rule engines help in our proposal for reasoning about protocols. We define some comparison relationships (dealing with notions of equivalence and specialization) between protocols used by agents from different systems.

Query Rewriting for an Incremental Search in Heterogeneous Linked Data Sources

Nowadays, the number of linked data sources available on the Web is considerable. In this scenario, users are interested in frameworks that help them to query those heterogeneous data sources in a friendly way, so avoiding awareness of the technical details related to the heterogeneity and variety of data sources. With this aim, we present a system that implements an innovative query approach that obtains results to user queries in an incremental way. It sequentially accesses different datasets, expressed with possibly different vocabularies. Our approach enriches previous answers each time a different dataset is accessed. Mapping axioms between datasets are used for rewriting the original query and so obtaining new queries expressed with terms in the vocabularies of the target dataset. These rewritten queries may be semantically equivalent or they could result in a certain semantic loss; in this case, an estimation of the loss of information incurred is presented.

Semantic interoperation among data systems at a communication level

The traditional perception of isolated data systems is changing to a new one where the interest of a real and efficient interoperation among those data systems is recognized. However, many problems must be solved yet before a real interoperation becomes true. In order to overcome the existing problems, there is a considerable number of proposals that can be found in the specialized literature that promote the idea of semantic interoperability. A new framework to achieve semantic interoperability among agent based data systems at a communication level is proposed in this paper. This framework permits agents belonging to different data systems 1) to send each other suitable messages without requiring the establishment of a common communication pattern in advance; 2) to understand, completely or partially, those messages that are interchanged among themselves; and 3) to invoke web services offered by the data systems at a high level without needing to go into technical details. An ontology that captures the semantics of different communication acts is the key element for supporting the functionalities provided by the framework. Furthermore, the framework has been extended to support semantic descriptions of web services, which favor their automatic discovery. The usefulness of the presented framework is evaluated using two case study of interoperation among heterogeneous data systems; on one side through the agents of those systems, and on the other side, through the combination of an agent and a web service.