A fuzzy-based context modeling and reasoning framework for CARA pervasive healthcare

Abstract

Pervasive computing is allowing healthcare to move from care by professionals in hospital to self-care, mobile care, and at-home care. The pervasive healthcare system, CARA(Context Aware Real-time Assistant), is designed to provide personalized healthcare services for chronic patients in a timely and appropriate manner by adapting the healthcare technology to fit in with normal activities of the elderly and working practices of the caregivers. This paper presents a fuzzy-logic based context model and a related context-aware reasoning middleware that provides a personalized, flexible and extensible reasoning framework for CARA. It provides context-aware data fusion and representation as well as inference mechanisms that support remote patient monitoring and caregiver notification. Noteworthy about the work is the use of fuzzy-logic to deal with the imperfections of the data, and the use of both structure and hierarchy to control the application of rules in the context reasoning system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.