Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Jaime Guixeres
Human Centred
Technology Laboratory,
Universidad Politcnica de
Valencia
jaiguipr@doctor.upv.es
Abstract
1. Introduction
Ontologies have become the knowledge
representation medium chosen in recent years for a
range of science areas including medicine [1], biomedicine [2], bio-informatics [3], semantic web [4],
agents [5], etc. However until the moment the design
of ontologies for psychology is not very common. In
this paper the ontological needs of psychology are
investigated and an ontology design for obesity
treatment is presented.
The term ontology was first defined by T. R.
Gruber in 1992 as a formal specification of a
conceptualization [6] which is the objects, concepts,
and other entities that are presumed to exist in some
area of interest and the relationships that hold among
them."
While the terms specification and
conceptualization have caused much discussion, the
essential points of this definition of ontology are:
Mariano Alcaiz
Human Centred
Technology Laboratory,
Universidad Politcnica de
Valencia
malcaniz@degi.upv.es
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Intelligents
fabrics
Mobile
devices
Wirelees
Communications
UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING
Nanotechnology
H
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a
l
t
h
2. Intelligent e-therapy
P
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t
I
m
p
l
i
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c
a
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n
Biometric
Voice
Recognition
NATURAL INTERACTION
Contextual
Information
Affectice
Computing
Personalized
PsicoEducation
Medical
Reporitory
Adaptive
Treatment
EHR
Artificial Intelligence
KNOWLEDGE BASE
Semantic Web
Ontologies
Virtual
Reality
Standards
Interactive
Tools
Tele-therapy
p
r
o
f
e
s
s
i
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n
a
l
s
d
e
s
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g
n
Real
World
3. Obesity Ontology
The Obesity is a problem that is increasing in an
alarming way among the population of all the ages, so
much in children population [12], [13] , as in the adult
age [14], up to the point of being considered as a new
epidemic. In fact, obesity is the most frequent
nutritional disorder in developed countries, reason why
the WHO (World Health Organization) declared it in
1998 [15] as a global epidemic, since it affects at least
300 million people who can be diagnosed like obese,
number that rises up to a billion of people in the world
if we speak about overweight [16]. For this reason we
have chosen obesity as an appropriate disorder to be
treated with intelligent e-therapy.
The language used to design the ontology is OWL
(Web Ontology Language). OWL is the most recent
development in standard ontology languages, endorsed
by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to
promote the Semantic Web vision.
"An OWL
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3.1. Agent
Any user of the system is considered as an agent.
Each agent has a name, a surname, a login and a
password. We can distinguish three different kinds of
agent: patient, familiar or professional. There are also
two types of professional: doctor or psychologist.
A patient is an obesity user that is going to be
treated. For each patient lot of data is needed.
Following are described the most important
information related to the patient:
Profile, has general information about the patient.
This information includes the address, academic data,
psychological data (test related to personality, selfrespect, life habits, etc.), background, etc.
Familiar, each patient can have one or more
familiar. In psychological treatments it is very
important to have one person that can help the patient
with the treatment at home.
Doctor and psychologist, each patient has a doctor
assigned that is going to see him during the treatment.
In the same way a patient has a psychologist assigned.
Medical and psychological diagnosis, after
studying the patient the doctor gives a medical
diagnosis and the psychologist gives a psychologist
diagnosis.
Medical and psychological treatment, the
professionals establish a specific treatment for the
patient. The medical treatment includes medicines
prescribed to the patient and the objectives of the
treatment. The psychological treatment includes
activities to be done by the patient alone or with the
psychologist.
Evaluation, include the measurements and
variables under control collected during the treatment.
A familiar is a user that is going to help a patient
during the treatment. Since a familiar is an agent has a
name, surname, login and password. Familiars are
really important when the patient is a child; in this case
the familiar (mother or father) participation is essential
(since the mother is the one that cooks for the child).
The professionals are the doctors or psychologists
that are going to treat the patient. As in the rest of cases
as are agents have a name, surname, login and
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3.2. Evaluation
The Evaluation entity represents all the variables
under control and measurements obtained from the
patient. We have different type of measurements:
psychological, obtained from the tests done by the
psychologist, physiological obtained by the doctor or
by a device connected to the patient and contextual
related to the environment of the patient (activity done
by the patient, position, etc.).
Physiological measurements are important due to
the risk that obese people have to suffer diseases of
diverse type, especially cardiovascular [19]. These
measurements are collected by a device connected to
the patient and analysed by the doctor to evaluate
patients situation and his evolution. At the moment
the variables measured are: respiratory rate, arterial
pressure, heart rate, body temperature. As well as these
variables the doctor also measures in each consultation:
tanita, tanner, height, weight and waist perimeter.
Contextual measurements give information about
the habits of the patient. In the obesity treatment is
very important the activity done by the patient and the
alimentary habits. Some of the variables considered as
contextual measurements are: caloric consumption,
physical activity level, position (sat down, standing up
and lied down), how many times the patient open the
fridge, what has eaten the patient, etc. These
measurements are collected by a device connected to
3.3. Treatment
This entity represents the planning done by the
psychologist to treat the patient. The psychologist
needs the doctor establishes general objectives for a
patient to plan his treatment. Once the general
objectives are defined the psychologist schedule the
sessions of the treatment.
A treatment is defined as a set of modules. A
completed obesity treatment consists of 8 different
modules. After analysing the psychological
information obtained from the tests initially done to the
patient the psychologist decided the appropriate
modules for this patient (not all the patients need all
the modules, sometimes is useful to focus only in some
specific modules).
A number of sessions has to be specified for each
selected module and for each session specific
objectives are defined. As well as objectives a session
also has information about what is going to be done in
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3.4. Alarms
As previously mentioned an evaluation entity,
representing all the variables under control and
measurements obtained from the patient, has been
defined. Most of these measurements have a maximum
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5. References
[1] Hu, B., Dasmahapatra, S., Dupplaw, D., Lewis, P.,
Shadbolt, N., 2007. Reflections on a medical ontology.
International Journal of Human- Computer Studies 65(2007)
pp.569-582.
from
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