Enhancing Context Analysis with Intelligence in Providing e-Health Services: Less Infrastructure Dependency in Supporting Cardio-Vascular Patients

In Europe, we observe an increasing number of people with health problems, who could theoretically receive care outside of a hospital when their condition could be properly monitored. Not being able to provide this monitoring leads to an increasing pressure on an already overcrowded hospital system and increased costs. Ubiquitous technology on top of a high-quality IT infra-structure has already proven to be able to provide partial solutions. However, such infrastructure is not available throughout Europe. This brings the challenge of finding cheap, adaptive, and less infrastructure-dependent technological solutions. In the current paper we propose some solution ideas concerning the mentioned problems, which ideas are rooted in context analysis. In particular, we take context into account because adequately adapting the delivered services to the situation of the patient could result in more effective support. We incorporate multi-level context states and distinguish between some perspectives on context states for the design of flexible and adaptive ICT applications. The IT system autonomously considers context not only for the patient but also for the other related stakeholders such as caregivers. We illustrate our ideas with an example concerning cardio-vascular patients and expect the solutions to be extendable to other health care domains. The results can be generalized to also derive more fundamental knowledge on the possible ways in which context-aware solutions can be applied.