Evaluation of Quality of Context Information in U-Health Smart Homes

Abstract

Ubiquitous Health (U-Health) smart homes are intelligent spaces capable of observing and correctly recognizing the activities and health statuses of their inhabitants (context) to provide the appropriate support to achieve an overall sense of health and well-being in their inhabitants’ daily lives. With the intrinsic heterogeneity and large number of sources of context information, aggregating and reasoning on low-quality raw sensed data may result in conflicting and erroneous evaluations of situations, affecting directly the reliability of the U-Health systems. In this environment, the evaluation and verification of Quality of Context (QoC) information plays a central role in improving the consistency and correctness of context-aware U-Health applications. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to highlight the impact of QoC on the correct behavior of U-Health systems, and introduce and analyze the existing approaches of modeling, evaluating, and using QoC to improve its context-aware decision-making support.