Ontology driven interactive healthcare with wearable sensors

Ubiquitous healthcare is the service that offers health-related information and contents to users without any limitations of time and space. Especially, to offer customized services to users, the technology of acquiring context information of users in real time is the most important consideration. In this paper, we researched wearable sensors. We proposed the ontology driven interactive healthcare with wearable sensors (OdIH_WS) to achieve customized healthcare service. For this purpose, wearable-sensor-based smart-wear and methods of data acquisition and processing are being developed. The proposed system has potential value in healthcare. A smart wear using wearable sensors is fabricated as a way of non-tight and comfortable style fitting for the curves of the human body based on clothes to wear in daily life. The design sample of the smart wear uses basic stretch materials and is designed to sustain its wearable property. To offer related information, it establishes an environment-information-based healthcare ontology model needed for inference, and it is composed of inside-outside context information models depending on the users’ context. The modeling of the proposed system involved combinations of information streams, focusing on service context information. With the proposed service inference rules, customized information and contents could be drawn by the inference engine. In the established OdIH_WS, real-time health information monitoring was achieved. The results of system performance and users’ satisfaction evaluations confirmed that the proposed system is superior to other existing systems.