P.A.L. - a personalised information broker for assisted living

Abstract

Today s world is seeing a shift towards achieving more independent living for all, including elderly or physically challenged persons. Professionals, especially in the health care domain coming in contact with this group are facing an ever-increasing need of collating information coming from a number of different sources, such as health clinics and hospitals, personal carers, and from other major stakeholders. Most often this information is either not found or at least not easily accessible from anywhere, at any time. Another challenge exists for medical consultants and health assistants in the field, in order to overcome difficulties associated with information exchange as well as communication between different applications and the data which can be shared amongst social and experts networks. The aim of P.A.L. is not only to provide a framework structure to gather and harvest information pertinent to the specialised domain, but it also aims to filter it and present the information to the users in a collaborative yet personalised environment independent of location or context. This library of information can then be utilised to build up a space for experience sharing, collaboration and management. The system proposed will not only automatically collect and distribute digital content but it also proposes to make use of semantic annotations rendering content machine-tractable, thus enhancing interoperability in the workflow process involving diverse applications and information sources.