Using a Personal Health Library-Enabled mHealth Recommender System for Self-Management of Diabetes Among Underserved Populations: Use Case for Knowledge Graphs and Linked Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a decentralized, privacy-aware personal health library platform that integrates digital health data with global knowledge to improve self-management of diabetes among underserved populations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized platform leveraging linked data for personalized health recommendations in diabetes care.

Findings

Designed a prototype PHL system supporting privacy and interoperability

Demonstrated use case scenario with four actors for diabetes management

Showed improved decision-making support for patients and caregivers

Abstract

Personal health libraries (PHLs) provide a single point of secure access to patients digital health data and enable the integration of knowledge stored in their digital health profiles with other sources of global knowledge. PHLs can help empower caregivers and health care providers to make informed decisions about patients health by understanding medical events in the context of their lives. This paper reports the implementation of a mobile health digital intervention that incorporates both digital health data stored in patients PHLs and other sources of contextual knowledge to deliver tailored recommendations for improving self-care behaviors in diabetic adults. We conducted a thematic assessment of patient functional and nonfunctional requirements that are missing from current EHRs based on evidence from the literature. We used the results to identify the technologies needed to address those requirements. We describe the technological infrastructures used to construct, manage, and integrate the types of knowledge stored in the PHL. We leverage the Social Linked Data (Solid) platform to design a fully decentralized and privacy-aware platform that supports interoperability and care integration. We provided an initial prototype design of a PHL and drafted a use case scenario that involves four actors to demonstrate how the proposed prototype can be used to address user requirements, including the construction and management of the PHL and its utilization for developing a mobile app that queries the knowledge stored and integrated into the PHL in a private and fully decentralized manner to provide better recommendations. The proposed PHL helps patients and their caregivers take a central role in making decisions regarding their health and equips their health care providers with informatics tools that support the collection and interpretation of the collected knowledge.