An ontology-based approach for representing medical recommendations in mhealth applications

Nowadays, mHealth applications have been evolving in the form of pervasive solutions for supporting healthy life-style and wellness self-management. In such a direction, the Italian project "Smart Health 2.0" realized innovative technological infrastructures, on which different mHealth applications and services were developed, aimed at remotely supporting individuals in diseases prevention and improving their welfare and life styles. In this paper, the ontology-based approach proposed in the project to represent, share, and reason on the knowledge characterizing a subject within mHealth applications is presented. The proposed approach uses a hybrid strategy integrating ontology models and deductive rules built on the top of them. In order to better describe the proposed approach, a case of application has been presented with respect to an mHealth application designed for managing diet according to given daily caloric needs.