LoCa – Towards a Context-aware Infrastructure for eHealth Applications

Nadine Fröhlich, Andreas Meier, Thorsten Möller, Marco Savini, Heiko Schuldt, Joël Vogt

In Proceedings

2009/9

Proceedings of fifteenth International Conference on Distributed Multimedia Systems (DMS'09)

Redwood City, San Francisco Bay, USA

New sensor technologies, powerful mobile devices and wearable computers in conjunction with wireless communication standards have opened new possibilities in providing customized software solutions for medical professionals and patients. Today, medical professionals are usually equipped with much more powerful hardware and software than some years before. The same is true for patients which, by making use of smart sensors and mobile devices for gathering, processing and analyzing data, can live independently in their home environment while receiving the degree of monitoring they would get in stationary care. All these environments are highly dynamic, due to the inherent mobility of users. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to automatically adapt the underlying IT  environment to the current needs of their users – which might change over time when user context evolves. In a digital home environment, this requires the automatic customization of user interfaces and the context-aware adaptation of monitoring workflows for mobile patients. This paper introduces the LoCa project which will provide a generic software infrastructure, able to dynamically adapt user interfaces and services-based distributed applications (workflows) to the actual context of a user (physician, caregiver, patient). In this  paper, we focus on the application of LoCa to monitoring the health state of mobile patients in a digital home environment.