An ontology based intelligent telehealth system for long-term management of hypertension

Abstract

Hypertension, also known as high or raised blood pressure, is a global public health issue that already affects one billion people worldwide, leading to heart attacks and strokes. As most hypertensive people have no symptoms at all, self-monitoring plays an important role in preventing or minimizing the risk of deadly complications. This study presents an intelligent telehealth system to help people perform this long-term management of hypertension easily and validly. It is composed of an electronic sphygmomanometer (i.e. blood pressure monitor) supporting 3G network, a central server for collecting and managing users' data, an ontology based decision support agent and a semantic web service for transmitting prescriptions to service users. A preliminary experimental platform has been constructed to test the performance of the system. The results indicate that the proposed system architecture can work effectively and alleviate the effort of a health expert particularly at primary care level.