OntoHealth: An Ontology Applied to Pervasive Hospital Environments

Pervasive Computing

Pervasive computing is a computing paradigm incorporated in a variety of devices (clothes, computers, cell phone, cars etc), which can carry out computing in a relatively non-intrusive manner and can impact and support many aspects of work and daily activities (Robinson, Wakeman, & Chalmers, 2008). It is the trend towards increasingly ubiquitous and connected computing devices in the environment which is being brought about by a convergence of advanced electronic – and particularly wireless – technologies and the Internet (Henricksen, Indulska, & Rakotonirainy, 2002).

Pervasive computing requires that computing tasks are aware of the surrounding environment and of the users’ needs, and also capable of adapt to these. A fundamental concept of pervasive computing is context awareness (Abowd, 1999). Context is any relevant information that can be used to characterize a situation of an entity. It includes background information, specification of user and application requirements as well as any relevant quantifiable entities in the environment.