BackgroundFor an optimal care of patients in home healthcare, it is essential to exchange healthcare-related information with other stakeholders. Unfortunately, paper-based documentation procedures as well as the heterogeneity between information systems inhibit a well-regulated communication. Therefore, a digital patient care record is introduced to establish the foundation for integrating healthcare-related information.MethodsFor the digital patient care record, suitable integration techniques are required that store data in a compact way and offer flexibility as well as robustness. For this purpose, a generic storage structure based on the entity-attribute-value (EAV) model is introduced. This storage structure fulfills the stated requirements and incoming information can be stored directly without any loss of data.Evaluation Results and DiscussionsFirst performance tests regarding the query response time are given in this paper. The tests measured the connection time, the query execution time, and the time for traversing the result set. The time for executing the query is lowest. The time for traversing the results strongly depends on the number of documents. A concept comparison to other integration techniques is also presented.ConclusionsThis approach offers flexibility concerning different standard types and the evolution in healthcare knowledge and processes. It also allows for highly sparse data to be stored in a compact way. The underlying database structure is presented, the import process for extracting incoming reports is described and the export process for generating new outgoing standardized reports is briefly illustrated.

No abstract

No abstract

Pervasive technologies are essential at any field of healthcare issues. Especially the growing number elderly necessitates the development of mesures to support care-dependent people at their private homes. One important research field are so called Smart-Rooms, local agglomerations of smart appliances, whose composition is prone to frequent, unforeseeable, and substantial changes. These compositions are able to react on the user's needs by interaction of individual appliances. Normally, these environments are equipped with smart sensors to infer the activities of the user. In case the environments know the current activity they can try to infer the next possible actions the user will take, thus assist the user pro-active. On the other side, these environments should be able to manage information or data the user 1 is interested in. Therefore it is necessary to offer solutions for data access and information exchange in ubiquitous environments with respect to the users needs and skills. Therefore, we present BlueS (Bluetooth-Services), our service based solution for data access and information exchange in spontaneous linked smart environments, e.g. Bluetooth networks. In this paper we want to focus on smart caching approaches for data reuse. A full descritpion of BlueS can be found in [10].