Development and Application of a Generic Methodology for the Construction of a Telemonitoring System

Telemonitoring systems are nowadays being extensively developed and utilized, due to the fact that the worldwide elderly population is increasing. In fact, the use of a telemonitoring system alleviate the problem of health costs by providing a reliable way of alerting the healthcare personnel. The design of a telemonitoring system is a real challenge. In this context, the architecture of a telemonitoring system must be generic and flexible and its knowledge must be well defined so it can be shared between actors of the system. In this paper, we present a methodology for the design of a telemonitoring system. This methodology is based on the use of multi-agent system, ontologies and expert systems. The proposed approach relies on an existing multi-agent methodology known as ASPECS. The latter is adapted to construct a telemonitoring system by adding several activities that introduce ontologies and expert systems. This methodology is applied to E-care, a platform designed for a large scale computing. E-care is a telemonitoring platform for patients suffering from heart failure. As part of this platform, several experiments were conducted to validate this methodology at Strasbourg University Hospital (Strasbourg, France). Preliminary results show that this platform is able to assist health care professionals. E-care processes data sent from the sensors and generates automatically alerts in order to detect early risk situations of heart failure.