Design of a Semantic Service for Management of Multi-domain Health Alarms

Alarm management is an essential capability of health information systems, but an inefficient dissemination of alarms produces the unawareness and fatigue of health professionals. Most initiatives in this field focus on particular scenarios or systems disregarding the whole health environment, and more sophisticated alarm systems are needed to address the complexity of such domain. The adoption of personalization and context awareness concepts in this field can ease the dissemination of alarm notifications to the proper users in the most suitable manner. In this work a service for notification of health alarms, capable of managing and combining profiles of health professional, alarm characteristics, and context conditions, is designed. It is based on semantic technologies to promote the interoperability of systems and establish a multi-domain framework. In particular, characteristics of professional users, alarms, and context are covered in an OWL ontology, and the user preferences and profiles are codified through SWRL rules. When an event happens, the service reasons about the user profiles and context conditions to disseminate the notification to those users (if there is any) willing to receive it, by choosing the most suitable channel for each one, and by adapting the notification to the reception device/s in each case. The design approached is independent of the underlying technology and can be translated to different technologies, what will be focus of future work.