Towards Knowledge Oriented Personal Health Systems

• Published in: Electronic Healthcare pp. 35 - 43
• Main Authors: Puustjärvi, Juha, Puustjärvi, Leena
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2012
• Series: Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
• Subjects: E-health tools; Information therapy; Ontologies; OWL; Patient-centered healthcare; Personal health records; RDF; Relational database system; SOA; triggers
• ISBN: 3642236340; 9783642236341
• ISSN: 1867-8211; 1867-822X
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-23635-8_5

Although current e-health tools such as personal health records have proven to be useful they still have many shortages. Especially, they do not provide effective means for querying personal health information. They also fail in information therapy, i.e., in providing the right information to right people at right time. In addition, they are totally passive, although through automating the control of patients health information we could significantly and cost-effectively improve the quality of patient-centered healthcare. In this paper, we describe our designed a knowledge oriented active personal health system, which does not suffer from these shortcomings. Its key components are the personal health ontology and the alerts. Through the ontology we can provide data expressive queries and avoid the problem of limited information supply, and through the alerts we can provide active elements for controlling patient’s health information. We present the ontology in a graphical form and in OWL, and give rules for transforming the ontology into relational model. We also present how the alerts can be implemented by the triggers supported by relational database systems.