Knowledge-Driven Personalized Contextual mHealth Service for Asthma Management in Children

Abstract

Wide adoption of smartphones and availability of low-cost sensors has resulted in seamless and continuous monitoring of physiology, environment, and public health notifications. However, personalized digital health and patient empowerment can become a reality only if the complex multisensory and multimodal data is processed within the patient context. Contextual processing of patient data along with personalized medical knowledge can lead to actionable information for better and timely decisions. We present a system called kHealth capable of aggregating multisensory and multimodal data from sensors (passive sensing) and answers to questionnaire (active sensing) from patients with asthma. We present our preliminary data analysis comprising data collected from real patients highlighting the challenges in deploying such an application. The results show strong promise to derive actionable information using a combination of physiological indicators from active and passive sensors that can help doctors determine more precisely the cause, severity, and control level of asthma. Information synthesized from kHealth can be used to alert patients and caregivers for seeking timely clinical assistance to better manage asthma and improve their quality of life.