Ontology-based intelligent healthcare agent and its application to respiratory waveform recognition

In recent years, the population has been aging gradually, and the number of patients with chronic respiratory disease has grown increasingly; therefore the respiratory healthcare plays an important role in the clinical care. This paper presents an ontology-based intelligent healthcare agent for the respiratory waveform recognition to assist the medical staff in judging the meaning of the graph reading from ventilators. The intelligent healthcare agent contains three modules, including the respiratory waveform ontology, ontology construction mechanism, and fuzzy recognition agent, to classify the respiratory waveform. The respiratory waveform ontology represents the respiratory domain knowledge, which will be utilized to classify and recognize the respiratory waveform by the intelligent healthcare agent. The ontology construction mechanism will infer the fuzzy numbers of each respiratory waveform from the patient or respiratory waveform repository. Next, the fuzzy recognition agent will classify and recognize the respiratory waveform into different types of respiratory waveforms. Finally, after the confirmation of medical experts, the classified and recognized results are stored in the classified waveform repository. The experimental results show that our approach can classify and recognize the respiratory waveform effectively. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.