Context-Aware Medical Systems within Healthcare Environments: A Systematic Scoping Review to Identify Subdomains and...

Area of Science:

• Pervasive Computing
• Health Informatics
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Context awareness is increasingly integrated into medical systems.
• Healthcare applications are beginning to utilize context-aware technologies.
• Understanding important contexts is vital for developing effective medical applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify key contexts within context-aware medical applications.
• To determine the domains of context-aware applications in healthcare.
• To illuminate successful early context-aware healthcare applications.

Main Methods:

• A systematic scoping review was conducted from April 2021 to June 2023.
• Searches were performed across multiple scientific databases (PubMed, EBSCO, IEEE, etc.).
• Articles were filtered by abstract and screened via full-text review, followed by data extraction.

Main Results:

• 25 articles met the inclusion criteria for data extraction.
• Commonly used contexts include user location (8/25), patient history (8/23), and activity level (7/25).
• Other significant contexts are demographic information (6/25), lab/vitals (7/25), time of day (5/25), and phone usage (5/25).

Conclusions:

• Key contexts for context-aware healthcare applications have been identified.
• This research highlights successful early applications and their leveraged contexts.
• Future systems can prioritize integrating these identified contexts for improved performance.