A Semantic Framework for Continuous U-health Services Provisioning

The need of having a more preventive, personalized and anticipatory healthcare for chronically ill patients entails a continuous provisioning of health services everywhere, anytime and to anyone. The ubiquitous computing paradigm is an approach to realize this vision. Nevertheless, the use of all potential ubiquitous health services and contextual information is quite limited in the literature. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a semantic framework for continuous ubiquitous services provisioning. Patients needs are represented in business processes. Also, this paper proposes a semantic description model of processes, services, as well as medical and environmental contextual information, in order to make it easier to select appropriate services out of semantically selected business processes. The suitability of the framework is evaluated through a case study for respiratory chronic disease, by making use of real patient data and health professionals from a public pediatric hospital.