LoCa – Towards a Context-aware Infrastructure for eHealth Applications

New sensor technologies, powerful mobile devices andwearable computers in conjunction with wireless communicationstandards have opened new possibilities in providingcustomized software solutions for medical professionalsand patients. Today, medical professionals are usuallyequipped with much more powerful hardware and softwarethan some years before. The same is true for patientswhich, by making use of smart sensors and mobile devicesfor gathering, processing and analyzing data, can live independentlyin their home environment while receiving thedegree of monitoring they would get in stationary care. Allthese environments are highly dynamic, due to the inherentmobility of users. Therefore, it is of utmost importance toautomatically adapt the underlying IT environment to thecurrent needs of their users – which might change over timewhen user context evolves. In a digital home environment,this requires the automatic customization of user interfacesand the context-aware adaptation of monitoring workflowsfor mobile patients. This paper introduces the LoCa projectwhich will provide a generic software infrastructure, able todynamically adapt user interfaces and services-based distributedapplications (workflows) to the actual context of auser (physician, caregiver, patient). In this paper, we focuson the application of LoCa to monitoring the health state ofmobile patients in a digital home environment.