Development and customization of individualized mobile healthcare applications

Currently, most of the mobile home care applications are not purposely personalized for a specific patient, showing difficulties in effectively adapting to his/her actual health status. As a consequence of that, this work proposes a methodology for building individualized mobile healthcare applications which embed decision support facilities and are easily customizable to the specific patients directly by the clinicians. Such a methodology has been designed and implemented with some experimental prototypes to face three specific critical points: i) modeling medical knowledge according to an expressive and understandable formalism and reasoning on it directly on a mobile device; ii) enabling the upgradability and maintainability of such a knowledge embedded into the decision support components deployed within mobile devices; iii) updating the knowledge currently used in the mobile healthcare application while it is running by avoiding any service interrupt.