eHealth service discovery framework: A case study in Ethiopia

Abstract

eHealth services just as general Health services mostly emphasize on patient record management systems. Unfortunately the information in these records is rarely used to provide quicker, personalized eHealth services and appropriate treatment especially in a low infrastructure context where health service providers are often overwhelmed by numbers leading to acute degradation in service delivery. Domain specific service discovery with personalization aims at providing user-aware services. This is very important in a low infrastructure context where most patient requirements particularly from rural areas are a consequence of low literacy levels. The focus of this paper is to describe a framework for eHealth service discovery in a low infrastructure context. To do this, we categorize the context of users and augment it with a user specific profile. Our framework provides ontology based, context-aware semantic and personalized services. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin.