Interoperability in Ambient Assisted Living using OpenEHR

The increasing number of elderly citizens in our society increases the strain on traditional healthcare systems´ resources. Ambient Assisted Living solutions seek to reduce the impact of this trend as well as provide a way for the elderly to continue living in their home environment as long as possible with a good quality of life and independence. However, due to the diverse nature of existing products and services, ensuring interoperability between them is important to provide flexible and adequate solutions for an individual´s particular needs. The goal of this work is to propose a solution for this problem using Electronic Health Records and health information standards. For this purpose, a repository was implemented to store records in Extensible Markup Language format following the openEHR standard, as well as an application to create, manage and query these records. An interface engine was used to provide message transformation capabilities between different standards and openEHR. The results gathered from an evaluation of this work show that such a system provides fast insertion of information and reasonable querying times for single records. Also, the message transformation capabilities developed in conjunction with the storage mechanism provide an important step towards solving the interoperability problem.