User-driven design of ontology-based, context-aware and self-learning continuous care applications

A plethora of technologies is adopted in modern continuous care settings. Nowadays, the nurse is responsible for orchestrating all these devices to take advantage of the collected information. This causes caregivers to lose time, miss out on patient insights and lack a general overview of the situation. In this paper, an ontology-based and self-learning context-aware platform is presented. This platform combines pervasive and context-aware techniques with knowledge management techniques to leverage the aforementioned problems and allows to easily build intelligent applications to support caregivers in their everyday activities. Moreover, a self-learning framework is proposed, which allows detecting trends in the usage of these applications and adapting them accordingly. However, the integration of context-aware technologies can prove to be difficult if domain experts are not involved in the development process. This increases the fear of the technology, makes the staff feel less in control and empowered and causes that the technologies are not tuned towards the work processes of the staff. Therefore, a participatory ontology engineering methodology is also presented which allows involving the stakeholders in each part of the development process of context-aware applications.