P.C. Vinh et al. (Eds.): ICCASA 2012, LNICST 109, pp. 62–71, 2013. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2013 The Requirements to Enhance the Design of Context-Aware Mobile Patient Monitoring Systems Using Wireless Sensors Mahmood Ghaleb Al-Bashayreh, Nor Laily Hashim, and Ola Taiseer Khorma UUM College of Arts and Sciences, School of Computing, 06010 UUM Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia mahmood.g.al-bashayreh@ieee.org, laily@uum.edu.my, ola_khorma@hotmail.com Abstract. Designing and developing Context-aware Mobile Patient Monitoring Systems (CMPMS) using wireless sensors are emerging in the biomedical informatics domain. However, previous studies related to this topic are fragmented. In fact, the literature has no standard types and sources of context information. These types and sources are required to design such systems. In addition, there is no standard context reasoning approach to facilitate the development of these systems. To address these absences, this paper is a survey of the CMPMS in the biomedical informatics to identify potential types and sources of context information as well as the context reasoning approaches that are required to be addressed in designing and developing such systems. The results are expected to help researchers to enhance the design and facilitate the development of CMPMS. Keywords: context awareness computing, mobile patient monitoring systems, context information types, context information sources, context reasoning approach, requirements. 1 Introduction The concept of context is broad and unclear, thus it must be defined. Literature revealed a large number of context definitions, each of which has different context information. Dey, Abowd, and Salber’s [1] general definition of context is the most adopted and referenced definition in the literature. They defined a context as “any information that can be used to characterize the situation of entities (i.e., whether a person, place, or object) that are considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and the application themselves. Context is typically the location, identity, and state of people, groups, and computational and physical objects.” [1] The term situation in this definition refers to “a description of the states of relevant entities” [2]. The term context-aware computing originally was coined by Schilit and Theimer [3], then it was elaborated on by Dey [2] to be more general to reflect the system capability to use “context to provide relevant information