Patient Centric Ontology For Telehealth Domain

This paper presents an ontology for the telehealth domain, a domain that concerns the use of telecommunication to support and deliver health related services e.g. patient monitoring and rehabilitative training. Our vision for the future of telehealth solutions is that they adapt their behavior to the needs, habits, and personality of the patient through user modeling and context awareness. The ontology will be our foundation for user modeling of patients in the telehealth domain, and hence it is one of the initial steps toward our vision. Compared to other ontologies within the domain, ours has explicit focus on: 1) personality traits of the patient, which is vital for fulfillment of our vision in term of adaptability, and 2) use of international standards to describe diseases, functioning and physiological measurement ICD, ICF and SNOMED respectively to promote interoperability with external systems. Besides being the foundation for user modeling, the ontology is a component in the Patient@home infrastructure, where it will ease the integration of applications to the platform, and facilitate semantic interoperability between the applications.