Leandro O. Freitas

Applying Pervasive Computing in an Architecture for Homecare Environments

Every year the queues in publics and privates hospitals grows due to, among others, the increasing of the world population and the delay in the patients attendance. This is a serious problem faced by administrators of hospitals whose believe that it is increasingly difficult to offer quality service to those who search for it. One of the ways to decrease these queues is through the development of homecare systems that ensure the patient to receive the clinic treatment directly in his house. These kind 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, we present in this paper the modelling of an architecture for pervasive systems to be applied in homecare environments. The pervasive systems developed from this modelling aim to improve the services provided by healthcare professionals in the treatment of patients that are located in their houses. The architecture uses concepts of pervasive computing to provide access to information anytime and wherever the user is, once a homecare environment has a high level of dynamicity of the involved. The knowledge representation of the environment needed in the modelling 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.

OntoHealth: An Ontology Applied to Pervasive Hospital Environments

In the last years ontologies are being used in the development of pervasive computing applications. It is habitual their use for facilitating the interoperability among context-aware applications and the entities that may enter in the context at any time. This chapter presents OntoHealth: an ontology applied to health pervasive environment and a tool to its processing. The main idea is that a hospital could be seen as this pervasive environment, where someone, through ubiquitous computing, engages a range of computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so. With the proposed ontology and the tool for its processing, the medical tasks can be shared by all components of this pervasive environment.

Architecture of central monitoring for pervasive homecare systems

This paper presents a system to monitor the vital signs of patients who receive medical treatment in homecare environments. We propose a central monitoring with which professionals will be able to manage different homecare domains with updated information. With this, when detected a worsen in patients health, the system will be able to send alert to caregivers or healthcare providers aiming to stabilize the frame.

OntoHealth: a system to process ontologies applied to health pervasive environment

In the last years ontologies are being used in the development of pervasive computing applications. It is habitual their use for facilitating the interoperability among context-aware applications and the entities that may enter in the context at any time. This paper presents OntoHealth: a system to process ontologies applied to health pervasive environment. The main idea is that a hospital could be seen as this pervasive environment, where someone, through ubiquitous computing, engages a range of computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so. With the proposed ontology and the tool for its processing, the medical tasks can be shared by all components of this pervasive environment.

Workflow Model for Management of Ontology of Homecare Pervasive Systems

Pervasive computing applied to healthcare is seen nowadays as an alternative to the overcrowding in hospitals. The implementation proactive applications improve the services offered, helping to speed the flow of treatment of patients. We present in this paper a workflow process to be used during the development of pervasive systems to homecare. This workflow represent the management of the ontologies used by the systems to represent the knowledge of the domain. We describe the processes that compose the workflow, showing a case study to validate it.