Context awareness in healthcare: a systematic literature review

The incorporation of information and communication technologies has transformed the health field. With the constant miniaturization of embedded devices, the increase in human–computer interactions and their ubiquity has increased the possibilities of intervention in this field of study. One of the fundamental characteristics of ubiquitous computing applied to health is context awareness. The use of context awareness in healthcare faces many challenges, which has led to the search for several solutions in the integration of sensors from different origins, in data fusion and reasoning algorithms, among others. This paper aims to explore the recent literature related to the use of context awareness in health, defining the taxonomy and identifying challenges and open questions. The method for achieving these objectives is to use the systematic literature review approach, which is characterized by research questions that guide the definition of a taxonomy and the search for challenges in the area. As a result, we have reviewed around 4000 scientific studies published over the last ten years, selecting and researching the most meaningful, in-depth approaches in the field of context-aware health, resulting in a final corpus of 38 articles. We have developed an up-to-date taxonomy that classifies context awareness in the field of health, as well as identifying open questions and issues that can guide future work in the area. These results, unified in one paper, contribute to a significant degree of coverage of the use of context-aware data in health.