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

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.

💡 Research Summary

This paper discusses the implementation of a mobile health digital intervention that integrates personal health libraries (PHLs) and other sources of contextual knowledge to improve self-care behaviors in diabetic adults. PHLs provide secure access to patients’ digital health data, enabling healthcare providers and caregivers to make informed decisions by understanding medical events within the context of their lives.

The authors conducted a thematic assessment of patient functional and non-functional requirements missing from current electronic health records (EHRs) based on literature evidence. They used these results to identify necessary technologies for addressing those requirements. The paper describes the technological infrastructures used to construct, manage, and integrate knowledge stored in PHLs. Leveraging Social Linked Data (Solid), they designed a fully decentralized and privacy-aware platform supporting interoperability and care integration.

An initial prototype design of a PHL was provided along with a use case scenario involving four actors demonstrating how the proposed system can be used to meet user requirements, including constructing and managing the PHL and using it for developing a mobile app that queries knowledge stored in the PHL in a private and fully decentralized manner. The proposed PHL helps patients and caregivers take a central role in health decisions while equipping healthcare providers with informatics tools to support the collection and interpretation of collected knowledge.

This paper highlights how integrating personal health data with other sources can improve self-management for diabetic adults, offering insights into the technological challenges and solutions involved in creating such systems.