title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Instituto Tecnológico de Orizaba, Orizaba, Mexico. galor@itorizaba.edu.mx
authors.forename: Giner
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Alor-Hernández
authors.forename: José Luis
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Sánchez-Cervantes
authors.forename: Ulises
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Juárez-Martínez
authors.forename: Rubén
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Posada-Gómez
authors.forename: Guillermo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Cortes-Robles
authors.forename: Alberto
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aguilar-Laserre
mesh_terms: D002170:Canada; D040421:Cell Phone; D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D054626:Consumer Health Information / Q000379:methods*; D004632:Emergency Medical Services; D006296:Health Services; D006801:Humans; D007256:Information Systems / Q000458:organization & administration*; D020407:Internet; D018511:Systems Integration; D013997:Time Factors; D014584:User-Computer Interface