Supporting the living of the elderly with semantic collaborative healthcare

Nowadays, for supporting the independent living and emergency treatment of the elderly, a number of individuals (e.g., professionals, caregivers, relatives, neighbors, and friends) have been involved in the healthcare process. The collaboration among them can supply more information to help making correct decision and taking action timely. However, it is a challenge to achieving an effective collaborative healthcare among multiple parities with individual knowledge, located in different places, operating in different time, and doing not know each other even. For addressing the challenges in collaborative healthcare, this paper proposes an ontology-based semantic collaborative healthcare approach to supporting and enhancing the living of the elderly people. This approach achieves the semantic collaboration by exploiting the knowledge about the elderly, healthcare related information tuple, and the users including professional, relatives and so on. Ontology is utilized to model and represent such kinds of knowledge. A tuplespace-based coordination model is adopted to support the cooperation among different parities at anytime and anywhere with anybody. We built a prototype system, and evaluated its effectiveness with preliminary experiments.