Health Improvement Path: Ontological Approach to Self-management Support in Personal Health Management Systems

Abstract

Ontologies have been used for knowledge modeling and reasoning in healthcare domain (e.g., homecare, hospital clinical procedure, mHealth, etc.), but few in a context of self-management in healthcare with no sufficient reasoning rules to specify a systematic health management plan for an individual. In response to such needs, we aim to provide a generic ontology model for organizing the broad range of multidisciplinary knowledge required in personal health management by applying the ontology design patterns as well as for being extensible to more specific activity ontologies (e.g., physical exercises, diet, medication intake, etc.). The scope of a proposed ontology is to classify core concepts and relations in health self-management process and to build axioms for health improvement plans to meet an individual’s needs and health capability/maturity level. The proposed ontology is developed based on our previous work, health capability maturity model (HCMM) and can be integrated with existing health-related ontologies for further specification in health management processes.