Adaptive Medical Workflow Management for a Context-Dependent Home Healthcare Assistance Service

The provision of health-care services and home assistance to the elderly and chronic patients is a challenging application scenario for Web Services composition, which support the integration of distributed, heterogeneous services in complex workflows. However, in order to support the management of the typical routine activities carried out when dealing with a patient, several contextual conditions, such as his health conditions and the presence of specialized personnel at his home, must be taken into account. Thus, context-awareness must be added to the developed services. In this paper, we present the architecture of a framework integrating workflow management and context-aware action execution to support the personalized management of medical guidelines in home health-care assistance services. The framework is based on the integration of Web Service and Autonomous Agents techniques, which enhance the execution of medical guidelines, handled as abstract workflows, with a context-sensitive execution of actions.