Semantic-based decision support for remote care of Dementia patients

This paper investigates the challenges in developing a semantic-based Dementia Care Decision Support System based on the non-intrusive monitoring of the patient´s behaviour. Semantic-based approaches are well suited for modelling context-aware scenarios similar to Dementia care systems, where the patient´s dynamic behaviour observations (occupants movement, equipment use) need to be analysed against the semantic knowledge about the patient´s condition (illness history, medical advice, known symptoms) in an integrated knowledgebase. However, our research findings establish that the ability of semantic technologies to reason upon the complex interrelated events emanating from the behaviour monitoring sensors to infer knowledge assisting medical advice represents a major challenge. We attempt to address this problem by introducing a new approach that relies on propositional calculus modelling to segregate complex events that are amenable for semantic reasoning from events that require pre-processing outside the semantic engine before they can be reasoned upon. The event pre-processing activity also controls the timing of triggering the reasoning process in order to further improve the efficiency of the inference process. Using regression analysis, we evaluate the response-time as the number of monitored patients increases and conclude that the incurred overhead on the response time of the prototype decision support systems remains tolerable.