Ontology-Based Contextual Information Gathering Tool for Collecting Patients Data Before, During and After a Digestive Surgery

Abstract

In the health domain, computer-based questionnaires are beneficial since they permit the collection of important elements regarding patients health status. These elements are generally used as input data for many medical systems such as health monitoring systems. The aim of this paper is to describe our contextual Information Gathering Tool (IGT). This tool permits to gather data by providing contextual questionnaires based on the question/answer mechanism and distributed architecture. Our proposed IGT is based on the use of an interrogation engine and ontologies. The engine provides contextual questionnaire as function of the user context and adapts questions depending on the users answer. The use of ontologies permits to model questionnaires and interrogations history. Moreover, ontologies are used to control the creation of questionnaires by offering meanings to the asked questions and then to the collected data. The proposed IGT is used in a clinical setting as a part of the E-care medical monitoring platform. It is applied to the rehabilitation process after a digestive surgery. The tool gathers contextual data relative to the patients hospitalization phase (i.e. before, during and after the surgery). The collected data are then represented graphically for statistical purposes and analyzed by the medical platform to make decisions regarding the patients health status (i.e. warning medical staff if dangerous situations are detected, generating health status indicators, providing useful therapeutic recommendations, etc.).