Integrating Context Information in a Mobile Environment using the eSana Framework

Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous in everyday’s life, their popularity and place independence are reasons for using these devices in different areas. One such area is electronic health, where patients can install small applications on their mobile devices that help or guide them in certain situations. The eSana framework offers a set of tools and approaches that allow the transmission of discrete physiological values electronically in order to evaluate them by medical experts. This paper presents an extension to this framework that includes the use of contextual information to improve eSana. The use case “Find nearby pharmacy” will illustrate a simple application that uses context information to guide the patient to the best pharmacy within his range. A second use case will enrich the existing idea of transmitting physiological parameters with context information. 1 Mobile devices in eHealth A very large percentage of the European population owns a mobile phone. Their ubiquity, connectivity and increasing features are reasons for using them in the electronic health sector. A number of researchers have worked on the idea of assigning mobile devices to patients. Furthermore, the survey presented in [WHO06] interprets the high demand of non-OECD countries for telemedicine and the use of a remote medical expertise to improve the available health care resources in less developed areas. When the mobile device is used to transmit physiological parameters, it is possible to distinguish between the following three domains: 1. Mobile devices are used to help the patient by providing information. 2. Mobile devices are used to transmit physiological parameters. 3. Mobile devices are used to alert patients or medical professionals when certain physiological parameters become critical. The HealthPal medical assistant in [KS06] is an example of the first domain. The dialoguebased monitoring system aims at supporting elderly people in their preferred environment. Another example is proposed in [KLWK06], where the presented system provides help for younger people that are suffering from overweight. An example of the second domain was done within the MOEBIUS project (Mobile extranetbased integrated user services) who integrated doctors and patients by submitting different physiological parameters [FRG06]. [LKHK05] describes the usage of mobile devices in order to assist young cancer patients and concludes that the usage of such a system has a number of advantages: higher compliance of appointments with alerting functionality, higher data quality, less work on part of the doctor to prepare the documentation, less errors in the documentation. An architectural and conceptual overview of an application of the third domain is described in [JH05]. Their work focuses mainly around the actors patient, doctor and nurse. The use cases for a mobile alerting system are built around them. Another example collecting real-time electrocardiogram signals including basic arrhythmia detection with automatic alerting to a call center is illustrated in [LML04]. Their system architecture uses readily available commercial off-the-shelf components. Finally, [HNW06] describes SAPHIRE, a monitoring and decision support environment that generates alerts if the patient’s state become critical, in an assisted home-based scenario. The existing eSana framework concentrates on the transimission of discrete physiological parameters (second domain). This paper is structured as follows: The next section provides a short introduction into the eSana framework. After that, the term context and its integration in the eSana framework is presented. Section 3 illustrates two use cases that can be realized with eSana. Finally, section 4 gives a discussion and an outlook. 2 The eSana Framework The approach used in the eSana framework as illustrated in figure 1 has been described in more detail in [SIM06] and [SIM05]. The main goals of applications using this framework are as follows: • Location and time-independent communication between doctor and patient. • Integration of the patient into the disease management and documentation process (patient empowerment, see level-of-care pyramid in [RD04]). Medical Device eSanaClient Additional Device