ITOHealth: a multimodal middleware-oriented integrated architecture for discovering medical entities

Abstract

Emergency healthcare is one of the emerging application domains for information services, which requires highly multimodal information services. The time of consuming pre-hospital emergency process is critical. Therefore, the minimization of required time for providing primary care and consultation to patients is one of the crucial factors when trying to improve the healthcare delivery in emergency situations. In this sense, dynamic location of medical entities is a complex process that needs time and it can be critical when a person requires medical attention. This work presents a multimodal location-based system for locating and assigning medical entities called ITOHealth. ITOHealth provides a multimodal middleware-oriented integrated architecture using a service-oriented architecture in order to provide information of medical entities in mobile devices and web browsers with enriched interfaces providing multimodality support. ITOHealth's multimodality is based on the use of Microsoft Agent Characters, the integration of natural language voice to the characters, and multi-language and multi-characters support providing an advantage for users with visual impairments.

Keywords:

• ITOHealth
• multimodality
• location-based system
• voice recognition

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the General Council of Superior Technological Education of Mexico (DGEST). Additionally, this work was sponsored by the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) and the Public Education Secretary (SEP) through PROMEP.

Declaration of Interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.