User Context Query Service Supporting Home Person-Centered Care for Elderly People

Abstract

Our research group has been studying person-centered care (PCC) support systems for home elderly care, using contextual information of individual users (called user context). Since the current systems individually manage the user context, reusing the contexts across multiple systems is quite different. In this paper, we propose a new service that uniformly manages the user context, and allows external applications to retrieve necessary user contexts efficiently. More specifically, the proposed service gathers heterogeneous data from different systems, and standardizes the data with a common database with general attributes of when, who, whom, where, what, how, and why. Using a practical use case, we show how the proposed service efficiently manages user contexts.