An Ontology for the Care of the Elder at Home

The care of the elder at home is highly demanded in modern societies. It is based on the difficult task of coordinating multiple professionals and procedures acting on the same patient. K4CARE is a project aiming at implementing and testing a technology-based incremental and adaptable model to assist health care systems in home care. One of the key components of this model is the Case Profile Ontology (CPO) that is used to support the activities in the life-cycle of home care. These activities define a path that goes from assessing the problem to deploying a care plan. Along this path several CPO-based tools have been implemented to ease the assessment step, to manage care plans as State-DecisionAction diagrams, to combine care plans for comorbid patients, and to personalize care plans. The use of these tools significantly reduces the complexity of dealing with patients at home.