Connecting user interfaces and user impairments for semantically optimized information flow in hospital information systems

The investigation of semantic relationship between the functional entities in a hospital information system, and their formal representation is of high value for automation purposes. The information flow in a health service setup revolves around some key entities such as various functional departments, information items generated from these departments, hospital staff and the patients. User’s interactions within the system presume the device and the user profiles to be integral components which correspond to user interface characteristics and user impairments respectively. There is a meaningful relationship between the semantics of the information items, the roles of hospital staff, the functional departments, the user interface characteristics and the user impairments or abilities. Semantic web technology is very helpful in order to formally describe the semantics of these entities in ontologies and then creating rules to formally connect these ensuring a controlled and optimized information flow in the overall system. A test case, by connecting user impairments and user interface characteristics, is presented to show the validity and efficacy of our approach. -- Knowledge personalization and customization ; semantic web ; connecting ontology ; medical informatics ; user interfaces