An Intelligent Knowledge-Based and Customizable Home Care System Framework with Ubiquitous Patient Monitoring and Alerting Techniques

• Main Authors: Yen-Lin Chen, Hsin-Han Chiang, Chao-Wei Yu, Chuan-Yen Chiang, Chuan-Ming Liu, Jenq-Haur Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2012-08-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: Healthcare systems; knowledge-based systems; patient monitoring; handheld devices; component-based framework; ubiquitous monitoring
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/12/8/11154

This study develops and integrates an efficient knowledge-based system and a component-based framework to design an intelligent and flexible home health care system. The proposed knowledge-based system integrates an efficient rule-based reasoning model and flexible knowledge rules for determining efficiently and rapidly the necessary physiological and medication treatment procedures based on software modules, video camera sensors, communication devices, and physiological sensor information. This knowledge-based system offers high flexibility for improving and extending the system further to meet the monitoring demands of new patient and caregiver health care by updating the knowledge rules in the inference mechanism. All of the proposed functional components in this study are reusable, configurable, and extensible for system developers. Based on the experimental results, the proposed intelligent homecare system demonstrates that it can accomplish the extensible, customizable, and configurable demands of the ubiquitous healthcare systems to meet the different demands of patients and caregivers under various rehabilitation and nursing conditions.