International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 22– No.3, May 2011 7 Context Aware Healthcare Application Shankari Bhattacharyya M.Tech Computer Science School of Computing Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore-632014, Tamil Nadu RA.K.Saravanagru Assistant Professor Senior School of Computing Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore-632014, Tamil Nadu Arunkumar Thangavelu Professor School of Computing Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore-632014, Tamil Nadu ABSTRACT Context-awareness is considered as an enabling technology and a rich area of application. This paper aims in monitoring and reporting critical health conditions of a patient who is suffering from brain tumor. We have built our ontology starting from knowledge gathering of data and reasoning to identify the health condition of the patient. So this has led to move towards to build an abstract framework for context-aware applications. Keywords Context-aware, health care, ontology, patient monitoring, rule- based systems. 1. INTRODUCTION The history of artificial intelligence shows that knowledge is the most critical for intelligent systems. Better knowledge is very important for solving any tasks. In order to have a truly intelligent system, knowledge needs to be captured and then processed and lastly it should be well communicated. All the above tasks are supported by Ontologies. Ontologies capture knowledge about some domain of interest and also describe the relationship that hold between those concepts. All around the world, the population is increasing, putting an enormous pressure on health systems. It is very difficult to predict or assume what the future hospital will be. The relevant physiological data, several variables related to the environment can be collected and interpreted in real-time. Context–Aware system considers this kind of information in a comprehensive fashion and improves the quality of medical care. In this paper we discuss about the possible solution and the various challenges and difficulties faced in context awareness in health care. The various uses of computerized tools such as powerful hospital information system is increasing in day to day life but these tools are not enough and the new technologies should support the new way of visualizing the future hospitals. So developing the future tools will require new technologies and also new architectures in order to develop secure and reliable system. The main focus is on indentifying, implementing new services for communication and cooperation of health care professionals. By communication we mean that it involves larger activities may be direct or indirect like laboratory results to consultations and advices. In almost all hospitals the doctors do take the utmost care of patients but the breakdown in communication causes error and which may lead to the death of the patients. Thus cooperation between health care professionals can be done trough computerized platforms say home care coordination for elder patients who will integrate new mobile tools and also proposes new communication abilities. Context–awareness is a concept and the technologies such as sensors, wearable instruments, intelligent artifacts, handheld computers etc. are available for the development of the new application which will make the health care professionals to manage their tasks and also it will increase the quality of the patient care. The research presented in this thesis is about how the inference is done mainly on knowledge base in an easier manner as compared to the rule based approach. The Protégé help us in designing the ontology for the medical domain and how the reasoner works and helps us inferring the correct suggestion in diagnosing the disease with the symptoms available in the knowledgebase. 2. INTRODCTION TO CONTEXT AWARE AND CONTEXT AWARE COMPUTING Schilit and Theimer (1994) refer to context as location, identities of nearby people and objects, and changes to those objects. Brown, Bovey et al. (1997) [13] define context as location, identities of the people around the user, the time of day, season, temperature, etc. Dey and Abowd’s definition (2001) [12]: Context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. “An application ability to adapt to changing circumstances and respond according to the context of use” [11] is defined as context aware computing. According to the definition of author Dey and Abowd’s definition (2001) [12] context-aware is if it uses context to provide relevant information and / or services to the user where the relevancy depends on the user’s task. 3. RELATED WORK Some of the existing context aware medical applications are: In VOCERA COMMUNICATION SYSTEM [2] experimentation was done in St. Vincent Hospital, Birmingham, USA. Before in St. Vincent Hospital had 802.11 networking to support mobile clinical users of wireless PDAs and laptops. STROKE ANGEL [3] experiment was conducted at Bad Neustadt, Germany. (November 2005-May 2008).The main aim of this system is to shorten the time requirement for the entire process. That is from discovery and diagnosing the stroke victim to the patient’s admission and treatment in hospitals. This is the main goal is to meet the short time frame in which to treat the stroke patient the first 3 hours after the stroke. In INTELLIGENT HOSPITAL