User-driven design of an ontology-based ambient-aware continuous care platform

The ultimate ambient intelligent care room environment would be able to sense the needs and preferences of the patients and nurses and adapt itself accordingly. This implies an emerging demand for the integration and exploitation of heterogeneous information available from different technologies. Nowadays, the nurse is responsible for orchestrating all these technologies, which slows down the adoption rate. In this paper, a context-aware, ambient aware and pervasive framework is proposed that tackles this integration problem by using an ontology. Rules, defined on top of this ontology, implement algorithms to optimize and automate care tasks. To increase the acceptance of the new technology, a user-driven development process is used which involves the stakeholders in every step of the design of the ontology and algorithms. To make the framework adaptable to future needs, a self-learning component is introduced that detects trends in the execution of the Rules and adapts the system accordingly.