Mobile Medicine: Semantic computing management for health care applications on desktop and mobile devices

Abstract

In many health care situations, powerful mobile tools may help to make decisions and provide support for continuous education and training. They can be useful in emergency conditions and for the supervised application of protocols and procedures. To this end, content models and formats with semantic and intelligence have more flexibility to provide medical personnel (both in off-line and on-line conditions) with more powerful tools than those currently on the market. In this paper, we are presenting Mobile Medicine solution, which exploits a collection of semantic computing technologies together with intelligent content model and tools to provide innovative services for medical personnel. Most of the activities of semantic computing are performed on the back office on a cloud computing architecture for: clustering, recommendations, intelligent content production and adaptation. The mobile devices have been endowed with a content organizer to collect local data, provide local suggestions, while supporting taxonomical searches and local queries on PDA and iPhone. The proposed solution is under usage at the main hospital in Florence. The smart content has been produced by medical personnel, with the adoption of the new ADF-Design authoring tool, which produces content in MPEG-21 format. The mobile content distribution service is integrated with a collaborative networking portal, for discussion on procedures and content, thus suggestions are provided on both PC and Mobiles (PDA and iPhone). © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.