An ontology approach to manage individual patient profiles in home-based telemonitoring scenarios

This paper presents an ontology proposal to manage individual profiles for patients follow-up in home telemonitoring scenarios. It provides a formal structure with a clear semantics used as a common knowledge to exchange information among the entities involved in the telemonitoring process, thus supporting health information interoperability. Monitoring guidelines, risk situations, reminders, clinical alarms and the acquired measurements results related with physician's specifications can be gathered in the profile based on the ontology definition. To illustrate the usage of the proposed ontology to generate a patient profile, a simplified case of use associated to a patient with heart attack risk is reported as example. Finally a proposal of home telemonitoring architecture where the defined ontology can be used as a common knowledge to share information is introduced.