Context-Aware Information Services for Health Care

Agility is a distinctive aspect of the health care profession. Clinicians operate in a fast changing environment with needs to access different pieces of information in different situations. On the surface it would appear that clinicians would benefit tremendously from the use of modern mobile technology. In reality, however, the health care sector has been hesitant to embrace electronic clinical information systems in general and mobile technologies in particular. To improve the adoption of mobile health information, we introduce an ontology-based Context Management System (CxMS) that allows the user to define contexts using terms from the medical field. In a highly sophisticated and complex field like health care, a generic or ‘one-size-fits-all’ context aware approach does not meet specialized requirements. The CxMS is extensible to allow the context aware system to develop and evolve in domain-specific ways.