MS Thesis Defense

Remedy: A Semantic and Collaborative
Approach to Community Health-Care

Primal Pappachan

10:00am Thursday, 31 July 2014, ITE 325b

Community Health Workers (CHWs) act as liaisons between health-care providers and patients in underserved or un-served areas. However, the lack of information sharing and training support impedes the effectiveness of CHWs and their ability to correctly diagnose patients. In this thesis, we propose and describe a system for mobile and wearable computing devices called Remedy which assists CHWs in decision making and facilitates collaboration among them. Remedy can infer possible diseases and treatments by representing the diseases, their symptoms, and patient context in OWL ontologies and by reasoning over this model. The use of semantic representation of data makes it easier to share knowledge such as disease, symptom, diagnosis guidelines, and demography related information, between various personnel involved in health-care (e.g., CHWs, patients, health-care providers). We describe the Remedy system with the help of a motivating community health-care scenario and present an Android prototype for smart phones and Google Glass.

Committee: Drs. Anupam Joshi (chair), Tim Finin, Michael Grasso, Aryya Gangopadhyay