Abstract:

The increasing use of ICT in health care is rapidly changing the medical procedures not only introducing new medical equipment, but also encouraging sharing experiences and knowledge. Sharing clinical information is a great opportunity offered by e-health to make available more specialized medical expertise, more accurate diagnostic processes, and more complete overview of the patient’s wellness. In particular, the information is crucial in the management of patients with chronic diseases where an adequate technological infrastructure may offer an efficient care service with high quality standards, both in hospital and at home. Moreover, de-hospitalization requires that both the medical and paramedical staff involved in the patient’s care and the patient himself should be properly trained. The main aims of the project UBICARE (UBIquitous knowledge-oriented HealthCARE), in which University and Industries cooperate, is to create a community for information sharing in order to: support medical and paramedical staff in difficult diagnosis; empower the patients, and train the medical and paramedical staff about diagnostic procedures, therapeutic interventions and follow-up of patients. In other words, UBI-CARE project aims at creating a system that favors the de-hospitalization of patients suffering from peritoneal dialysis and chronic heart failure using the Hub&Spoke model. The Hub-and-Spoke system, commonly used by the airlines, is becoming popular for hospital networks, where there is a single specialized center (Hub) for the treatment of a specific disease that is supported by a network of services (Spokes) to transport the patients to reach the minimum severity levels required to take advantage of the specific treatment. In this context, the paper aims at presenting the Knowledge Management System (KMS) component that aims at managing all the learning activities and knowledge resources in the system.

In particular, the services offered by the component are: Situated learning, Simulation and Experience Manager.
a) Situated learning component aims to offer each user the best knowledge resources based on specific training needs. This component is a recommender system that using a content-based approach is able to suggest in addition to the resources that meet the user’s request, a set of related resources that have a semantic correlation with the one selected by the user.
b) Simulation component, using the game approach, allows different user profiles (patient and caregiver, medical and paramedical staff) to be trained to manage daily activities of the patient, therapy and critical events. In other words, the simulation component starting from real medical records builds on the basis of the user profile a realistic problem, in order to allow specific skills about treatment protocols, diagnostic procedure and actions to take in emergency situations to be acquired.
c) Experiences Manager component supports the sharing of best practices among practitioners. It allows to access to resources for professional updates and international official guidelines, to share links to non official resources and websites that are considered interesting by the community, and to share information and discuss on a particularly difficult case to find the best solution using the Question&Answer model.

Moreover, a tagging support system, that using Multiwordnet lexical database, supports the user both during the resource upload and in searching process.

Keywords:

E-health, situated learning, recommender system, sharing experience.