Taqdir Ali

On curating multimodal sensory data for personalized health and wellness services

In recent years, the focus of healthcare and wellness technologies has shown a significant shift towards personal vital signs devices. The technology has evolved from smartphone-based wellness applications to fitness bands and smartwatches. The novelty of these devices is the accumulation of activity data as their users go about their daily life routine. However, these implementations are device specific and lack the ability to incorporate multimodal data sources. Data accumulated in their usage does not offer rich contextual information that is adequate for providing a holistic view of a user’s lifelog. As a result, making decisions and generating recommendations based on this data are single dimensional. In this paper, we present our Data Curation Framework (DCF) which is device independent and accumulates a user’s sensory data from multimodal data sources in real time. DCF curates the context of this accumulated data over the user’s lifelog. DCF provides rule-based anomaly detection over this context-rich lifelog in real time. To provide computation and persistence over the large volume of sensory data, DCF utilizes the distributed and ubiquitous environment of the cloud platform. DCF has been evaluated for its performance, correctness, ability to detect complex anomalies, and management support for a large volume of sensory data.

Context representation and fusion: advancements and opportunities.

The acceptance and usability of context-aware systems have given them the edge of wide use in various domains and has also attracted the attention of researchers in the area of context-aware computing. Making user context information available to such systems is the center of attention. However, there is very little emphasis given to the process of context representation and context fusion which are integral parts of context-aware systems. Context representation and fusion facilitate in recognizing the dependency/relationship of one data source on another to extract a better understanding of user context. The problem is more critical when data is emerging from heterogeneous sources of diverse nature like sensors, user profiles, and social interactions and also at different timestamps. Both the processes of context representation and fusion are followed in one way or another; however, they are not discussed explicitly for the realization of context-aware systems. In other words most of the context-aware systems underestimate the importance context representation and fusion. This research has explicitly focused on the importance of both the processes of context representation and fusion and has streamlined their existence in the overall architecture of context-aware systems’ design and development. Various applications of context representation and fusion in context-aware systems are also highlighted in this research. A detailed review on both the processes is provided in this research with their applications. Future research directions (challenges) are also highlighted which needs proper attention for the purpose of achieving the goal of realizing context-aware systems.

An innovative platform for person-centric health and wellness support

Modern digital technologies are paving the path to a revolutionary new concept of health and wellness care. Nowadays, many new solutions are being released and put at the reach of most consumers for promoting their health and wellness self-management. However, most of these applications are of very limited use, arguable accuracy and scarce interoperability with other similar systems. Accordingly, frameworks that may orchestrate, and intelligently leverage, all the data, information and knowledge generated through these systems are particularly required. This work introduces Mining Minds, an innovative framework that builds on some of the most prominent modern digital technologies, such as Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Internet of Things, to enable the provision of personalized healthcare and wellness support. This paper aims at describing the efficient and rational combination and interoperation of these technologies, as well as their integration with current and future personalized health and wellness services and business.

Mining human behavior for health promotion

The monitoring of human lifestyles has gained much attention in the recent years. This work presents a novel approach to combine multiple context-awareness technologies for the automatic analysis of peoples conduct in a comprehensive and holistic manner. Activity recognition, emotion recognition, location detection, and social analysis techniques are integrated with ontological mechanisms as part of a framework to identify human behavior. Key architectural components, methods and evidences are described in this paper to illustrate the interest of the proposed approach.

Data-driven knowledge acquisition, validation, and transformation into HL7 Arden Syntax

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to help a team of physicians and knowledge engineers acquire clinical knowledge from existing practices datasets for treatment of head and neck cancer, to validate the knowledge against published guidelines, to create refined rules, and to incorporate these rules into clinical workflow for clinical decision support. METHODS AND MATERIALS A team of physicians (clinical domain experts) and knowledge engineers adapt an approach for modeling existing treatment practices into final executable clinical models. For initial work, the oral cavity is selected as the candidate target area for the creation of rules covering a treatment plan for cancer. The final executable model is presented in HL7 Arden Syntax, which helps the clinical knowledge be shared among organizations. We use a data-driven knowledge acquisition approach based on analysis of real patient datasets to generate a predictive model (PM). The PM is converted into a refined-clinical knowledge model (R-CKM), which follows a rigorous validation process. The validation process uses a clinical knowledge model (CKM), which provides the basis for defining underlying validation criteria. The R-CKM is converted into a set of medical logic modules (MLMs) and is evaluated using real patient data from a hospital information system. RESULTS We selected the oral cavity as the intended site for derivation of all related clinical rules for possible associated treatment plans. A team of physicians analyzed the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines for the oral cavity and created a common CKM. Among the decision tree algorithms, chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) was applied to a refined dataset of 1229 patients to generate the PM. The PM was tested on a disjoint dataset of 739 patients, which gives 59.0% accuracy. Using a rigorous validation process, the R-CKM was created from the PM as the final model, after conforming to the CKM. The R-CKM was converted into four candidate MLMs, and was used to evaluate real data from 739 patients, yielding efficient performance with 53.0% accuracy. CONCLUSION Data-driven knowledge acquisition and validation against published guidelines were used to help a team of physicians and knowledge engineers create executable clinical knowledge. The advantages of the R-CKM are twofold: it reflects real practices and conforms to standard guidelines, while providing optimal accuracy comparable to that of a PM. The proposed approach yields better insight into the steps of knowledge acquisition and enhances collaboration efforts of the team of physicians and knowledge engineers.

High-Level Context Inference for Human Behavior Identification

This work presents the Mining Minds Context Ontology, an ontology for the identification of human behavior. This ontology comprehensively models high-level context based on low-level information, including the user activities, locations, and emotions. The Mining Minds Context Ontology is the means to infer high-level context from the low-level information. High-level contexts can be inferred from unclassified contexts by reasoning on the Mining Minds Context Ontology. The Mining Minds Context Ontology is shown to be flexible enough to operate in real life scenarios in which emotion recognition systems may not always be available. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the activity and the location might not be enough to detect some of the high-level contexts, and that the emotion enables a more accurate high-level context identification. This work paves the path for the future implementation of the high-level context recognition system in the Mining Minds project.

Knowledge-Based Query Construction Using the CDSS Knowledge Base for Efficient Evidence Retrieval

Finding appropriate evidence to support clinical practices is always challenging, and the construction of a query to retrieve such evidence is a fundamental step. Typically, evidence is found using manual or semi-automatic methods, which are time-consuming and sometimes make it difficult to construct knowledge-based complex queries. To overcome the difficulty in constructing knowledge-based complex queries, we utilized the knowledge base (KB) of the clinical decision support system (CDSS), which has the potential to provide sufficient contextual information. To automatically construct knowledge-based complex queries, we designed methods to parse rule structure in KB of CDSS in order to determine an executable path and extract the terms by parsing the control structures and logic connectives used in the logic. The automatically constructed knowledge-based complex queries were executed on the PubMed search service to evaluate the results on the reduction of retrieved citations with high relevance. The average number of citations was reduced from 56,249 citations to 330 citations with the knowledge-based query construction approach, and relevance increased from 1 term to 6 terms on average. The ability to automatically retrieve relevant evidence maximizes efficiency for clinicians in terms of time, based on feedback collected from clinicians. This approach is generally useful in evidence-based medicine, especially in ambient assisted living environments where automation is highly important.

GUDM: Automatic Generation of Unified Datasets for Learning and Reasoning in Healthcare

A wide array of biomedical data are generated and made available to healthcare experts. However, due to the diverse nature of data, it is difficult to predict outcomes from it. It is therefore necessary to combine these diverse data sources into a single unified dataset. This paper proposes a global unified data model (GUDM) to provide a global unified data structure for all data sources and generate a unified dataset by a “data modeler” tool. The proposed tool implements user-centric priority based approach which can easily resolve the problems of unified data modeling and overlapping attributes across multiple datasets. The tool is illustrated using sample diabetes mellitus data. The diverse data sources to generate the unified dataset for diabetes mellitus include clinical trial information, a social media interaction dataset and physical activity data collected using different sensors. To realize the significance of the unified dataset, we adopted a well-known rough set theory based rules creation process to create rules from the unified dataset. The evaluation of the tool on six different sets of locally created diverse datasets shows that the tool, on average, reduces 94.1% time efforts of the experts and knowledge engineer while creating unified datasets.

KnowledgeButton: An evidence adaptive tool for CDSS and clinical research

Healthcare domain is continuously growing with new knowledge emerged at different levels of clinical interest. At the same time, there is an increasing interest in the use of clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) to increase the healthcare quality and efficiency. Majorly the existing CDSSs are not designed to adapt scientific research in a well-established and automatic manner. Clinicians and researchers access the online resources on frequent basis for unmet questions during the course of patient care. They usually follow a dis-integrated approach to search for their required information from resources of their interest. Additionally, there is lack of defined mechanism to integrate the relevant knowledge for future use. To overcome the disintegrated and non-automatic approach, we introduce the concept of KnowledgeButton; a comprehensive model for evidence adaption from online credible knowledge sources in a well-defined and established manner. It saves the time of clinicians spend unnecessary in searching research evidence using disintegrated and manual mechanism. In this paper, we provide architecture design, workflows, and scenarios complemented with primary results. It covers walk-through from search query generation to evaluation of search results.

Customized clinical domain ontology extraction for knowledge authoring tool

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) require a shareable and adaptable knowledge base. However, sharing and reusing the experts knowledge is a challenging task. The proposed approach designs a web based application that acquires and adapts the clinical experts knowledge into shareable knowledge base. The system, Intelligent Knowledge Authoring Tool (I-KAT) creates rules in the form of Medical Logic Module (MLM) using HL7 standard Arden Syntax. These rules are easily shareable with HL7 complaint clinical institutions and organizations. To achieve interoperability using MLM, the system uses a mechanism for integration of terminology standard (SNOMED CT) concepts with CDSS standard (Virtual Medical Record (vMR)). The SNOMED CT ontology is comprehensive; containing more than 0.3 million concepts but 10--15% concepts of total ontology is normally used in rule creation for a specific domain. Semantically defining relationships between SNOMED CT concepts and vMR concepts require domain ontology development from the SNOMED ontology. In this paper we focus on automatic extraction of domain ontology from overall SNOMED CT ontology on the basis of vMR schema concepts and their attributes mapping with corresponding SNOMED CT concepts. The extracted domain ontology will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of searching mechanism in contextual selection process.