Distributed Continuous Home Care Provisioning through Personalized Monitoring & Treatment Planning

Abstract

In healthcare, the aging of the population is resulting in a gradual shift from residential care to home care, requiring reliable follow-up of elderly people by a whole network of care providers. The environment of these patients is increasingly being equipped with different monitoring devices, which allow to obtain insight into the current condition of patient & environment. However, current monitoring platforms that support care providers are centralized and not personalized, reducing performance, scalability, autonomy and privacy. Because the available data is only exposed through custom APIs, profile knowledge cannot be efficiently exchanged, which is required to provide optimal care. Therefore, this paper presents a distributed data-driven platform, built on Semantic Web technologies, that enables the integration of all profile knowledge in order to deliver personalized continuous home care. It provides a distributed smart monitoring service, which allows to locally monitor only the relevant sensors according to the patient's profile, and infer personalized decisions when analyzing events. Moreover, it provides a medical treatment planning service, which composes treatment plans tailored to each patient, including personalized quality of service parameters allowing a doctor to select the optimal plan. To illustrate how the platform delivers these services, the paper also presents a demonstrator using a realistic home care scenario.