Applying formalized rules for treatment procedures to data delivered by personal medical devices.

The paper presents a novel approach to online application of formalized rules for medical treatment procedures when processing data from personal medical devices. The rules are formalized by using a rule-based reasoning approach and are applied in order to enhance patient safety and support physicians in their daily work. The presented approach relies on dividing data processing into two stages: (1) the event processing stage and (2) the knowledge application stage. At the event processing stage raw data produced by personal medical devices is transformed into an aggregated/correlated form, as required by the rules for treatment procedures. At the knowledge application stage formalized rules are applied to transformed data, resulting in execution of various support actions. This paper describes how rules for treatment of patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases can be expressed in terms of an event processing statement set and a rule engine knowledge base. The technical feasibility of the proposed approach is supported by a detailed description of the TeleCARE remote healthcare framework - an implementation of the proposed approach along with evaluation performed using a large number of simulated personal medical devices.