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Knowledge-driven delivery of home care services

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Abstract

Home Care (HC) assistance is emerging as an effective and efficient alternative to institutionalized care, especially for the case of senior patients that present multiple co-morbidities and require life long treatments under continuous supervision. The care of such patients requires the definition of specially tailored treatments and their delivery involves the coordination of a team of professionals from different institutions, requiring the management of many kinds of knowledge (medical, organizational, social and procedural). The K4Care project aims to assist the HC of elderly patients by proposing a standard HC model and implementing it in a knowledge-driven e-health platform aimed to support the provision of HC services. This paper focuses on two knowledge-based personalization aspects incorporated in the platform that aim to overcome the difficulties of HC delivery. The first one is the assistance to medical practitioners in the process of defining a customized treatment adjusted to the medical and social conditions of a particular patient in order to consider multiple co-morbidities. The second one is the possibility of tailoring the profiles of the care professionals according to the medical and organizational daily requirements in order to allow a flexible care delivery. Those two aspects, guided by the knowledge explicitly represented in the platform, play a crucial role in the medical and social acceptance of this kind of e-health systems. The paper also includes a real case study designed and tested by healthcare professionals and includes encouraging results from the test of the platform in a real health care environment in the city of Pollenza (Italy).

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Notes

  1. INR (International Normalized Ratio) measures the time it takes for blood to clot and compares it to an average.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (pre-doctoral grants of Montserrat Batet, Lucas Marín and Sergio Martínez, and post-doctoral grant of David Isern) and the European Union (K4Care project, Knowledge Based Home Care eServices for an Ageing Europe, IST-2004-026968). The authors would like to acknowledge the work of the other members of the K4Care consortium, especially the medical partners, led by Dr. Fabio Campana, and Dr. David Riaño (project co-ordinator and designer of the SDA* formalism).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departament d’Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques, Intelligent Technologies for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition (ITAKA) research group, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. Països Catalans 26 (Campus Sescelades), 43007, Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain

    Montserrat Batet, David Isern, Lucas Marin, Sergio Martínez, Antonio Moreno, David Sánchez & Aida Valls

  2. Department of Statistics and Operational Research, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, C/ Jordi Girona, 1–3, 08034, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

    Karina Gibert

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  1. Montserrat Batet
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  3. Lucas Marin
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Correspondence to David Sánchez.

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Batet, M., Isern, D., Marin, L. et al. Knowledge-driven delivery of home care services. J Intell Inf Syst 38, 95–130 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-010-0145-0

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