Ontology model-based situation and socially-aware health care service in a smart home environment

Abstract

With the brilliant advance of ubiquitous technologies, it is possible to provide more smart and pervasive healthcare services in a smart home environment. Despite of these remarkable advances of technologies, there are few smart home-based personalized healthcare services which fully consider not only user's current situation but also user's social relationship. In this paper, we try to model contexts which are generally distributed in smart home environment using the ontology technology. The set of modeled contexts includes home domain-based contexts and social relationship-based contexts. Based on these context models, we can provide fully personalized healthcare service to a specific user in a smart home environment. For verifying the usefulness of the proposed smart home service, we implemented a prototype of healthcare services. Through the demonstration of the developed prototype, we know that using ontology-based context awareness model can provide situation and social-aware health care services in much pervasive way. © 2013 SERSC.