Mobile cyber physical systems for health care: Functions, ambient ontology and e-diagnostics

In recent decades, people, especially the older ones, try to live at home in autonomous way. For this purpose it is useful to monitor their vital signs and the home environment to activate suitable environment regulation and to send alarms to family members, medical, or hospitals, according to the criticality of the subject. The paper aims at proposing a flexible and reliable monitoring system based on embedded systems and wearable devices. The system main feature is that it allows the doctor and family members to monitor the patients at distance using their mobiles. A suitable communication with the first aid center is foreseen for a fast rescue of the patients in case of critical situations. A user model ontology is adopted so that patient and context data may be used by any diagnostic and first aid software, thus envisaging an open and interoperable health monitoring system for elderly people living at home. A diagnostic system based on fuzzy rules is proposed to support the choice of the best course of actions in case of critical health conditions.