A methodology based on openEHR archetypes and software agents for developing e-health applications reusing legacy systems

Design science research (DSR) seeks to grow technology and science knowledge bases via the creation of innovative artifacts that solve problems and improve the environments in which they are instantiated. The field of healthcare offers many opportunities for the use of DSR to design innovations with a goal of improving the effectiveness and efficiencies of healthcare products, services, and delivery. We identify areas of opportunity via a qualitative survey of recent healthcare projects that apply DSR methods. Two cases are explored in more detail to demonstrate the use of DSR in challenging healthcare environments. Goals of purposefulness and innovation are identified in the projects. We conclude with a discussion of how DSR can have a broader impact on future research and practice in healthcare.

Design Science Research Opportunities in Health Care

The emergence of mobile healthcare systems is an important outcome of application of pervasive computing concepts for medical care purposes. These systems provide the facilities and infrastructure required for automatic and ubiquitous sharing of medical information. Healthcare systems have a dynamic structure and configuration, therefore having an architecture is essential for future development of these systems. The need for increased response rate, problem limited storage, accelerated processing and etc. the tendency toward creating a new generation of healthcare system architecture highlight the need for further focus on cloud-based solutions for transfer data and data processing challenges. Integrity and reliability of healthcare systems are of critical importance, as even the slightest error may put the patients' lives in danger; therefore acquiring a behavioral model for these systems and developing the tools required to model their behaviors are of significant importance. The high-level designs may contain some flaws, therefor the system must be fully examined for different scenarios and conditions. This paper presents a software architecture for development of healthcare systems based on pervasive computing concepts, and then models the behavior of described system. A set of solutions are then proposed to improve the design's qualitative characteristics including, availability, interoperability and performance.

Behavioral Reference Model for Pervasive Healthcare Systems

Requirements patterns for context aware system is challenging due to dynamic and ambiguous nature of context data which remain poorly characterized. A significant amount of research is being done on formalizing context aware systems. However, only few works has been done on requirement patterns which are mandatory to derive complete, consistent and deployable specifications for context data. Since context aware systems with its applications and simulation are still in pilot study. There is a need of formalizing context properties and a methodology to drive the contextual requirements in the system. Further to focus the research problem, empirical study was carried out to investigate context aware pattern properties and different context aware pattern aspects. The contribution of this paper work is to propose ontology based context aware requirement patterns (CaRePa). This CaRePa compared with existing models in context aware patterns. New set of context properties are identified and merged with the CaRePa template. Verification can be performed with the model created using ontology for context aware requirement patterns.

Formalizing context aware requirement patterns using ontology

Pervasive Healthcare Computing and its Contribution to Hospitals, Chronic and Preventive Care

This paper presents an architecture for health information exchange in pervasive healthcare environments meant to be generally applicable to different applications in the healthcare domain. Our architecture has been designed for message exchange by integrating ubiquitous computing technologies, intelligent agents and healthcare standards, in order to provide interoperability between healthcare systems. We conduct controlled experiments at three cardiology clinics, an analysis laboratory, and the cardiology sector of a hospital located in Marilia (Sao Paulo, Brazil). Three scenarios were developed to evaluate this architecture, and the results showed that the architecture is suitable to facilitate the development of healthcare systems by offering generic and powerful message exchange capabilities. The proposed architecture facilitates health information exchange between various healthcare information systems, contributing in this way to the development of a pervasive healthcare environment that allows healthcare to be available anywhere, anytime and to anyone.

L.A. Maciaszek

Papers

An Architecture for Health Information Exchange in Pervasive Healthcare Environment