Context awareness in health care: a review

Health care systems will integrate new computing paradigms in the coming years. Context-awareness computing is a research field which often refers to health care as an interesting and rich area of application.

Through a survey of the research literature, we intended to derive an objective view of the actual dynamism of context awareness in health care, and to identify strengths and weaknesses in this field.

After discussing definitions of context, we proposed a simple framework to analyse and characterize the use of context through three main axes. We then focused on context-awareness computing and reported on the main teams working in this area. We described some of the context-awareness projects in health care. A deeper analysis of the hospital-based projects demonstrated the gap between recommendations expressed for modelling context awareness and the actual use in a prototype. Finally, we identified pitfalls encountered in this area of research.

A number of opportunities remain for this evolving field of research. We found relatively few groups with such a specific focus. As yet there is no consensus as to the most appropriate models or attributes to include in context awareness. We conclude that a greater understanding of which aspects of context are important in a health care setting is required; the inherent sociotechnical nature of context-aware applications in health care; and the need to draw on a number of disciplines to conduct this research.