Reasoning on Health Condition Evolution for Enhanced Detection of Vulnerable People in Emergency Settings

Abstract

During an emergency event, such as a fire evacuation, support services benefit from having information about people who may require special assistance. In this context, health data represents a particularly important source of information, as it can allow an emergency response system to build an accurate picture of people's relevant health conditions and use this to advise responders. However, to perform this task, a system needs to represent and reason over the evolution of health conditions over time. Crucially, it needs to predict the probability that a potentially relevant condition mentioned in a health record is still valid at the time of the emergency. In this paper, we propose a methodology for representing the evolution of health conditions and reasoning about them in the context of an emergency scenario. To support our approach with data, we develop a pipeline to capture knowledge about condition evolution from reliable sources in natural language. We incorporate these two components into a system that predicts a person's likelihood of being vulnerable during an emergency event. Finally, we demonstrate that representing and reasoning about condition evolution improves the quality and precision of the recommendations provided by our system to emergency services.