An Ontology for Rehabilitation Assessment: Case Study Palestine

Physiotherapists need appropriate data management for patient management with disabilities. Rehabilitation principles, such as evaluation, goal setting, treatment, and results, are the framework for therapy development. Nevertheless, the suitability of controlled rehabilitation studies for all instances of real-life procedures has been an issue that still requires attention because of the differences in the disease conditions that patients may have. In Palestine, such rehabilitation data is often very unstructured, semi-structured, and manually logged, which makes integration within the patient's medical report a challenging task. The existing rehabilitation ontologies, in the form of physical medicine and rehabilitation, do not completely support standard physical therapy (PT) and occupational therapy (OT) assessments as used in Palestine. This is because their combination with the ontology was not applied. To address this problem, a new rehabilitation assessment ontology (RAO) system is suggested as the foundation, which will be composed of PT and OT standard assessments alongside vital patient information. The RAO was developed using the 101-ontology method by conducting interviews across the three rehabilitation centers in Palestine: Specialized Al-Ibtisameh Al-Jamelah Physiotherapy Center (BJC), Hashmi for Specialized Physiotherapy and Spinal Manipulation (HSPT), and Future Magic. The knowledge was collected from a patient profile containing a total of 120 and was utilized to create automatic ontology population rehab gazetteers. The RAO was assessed by a group of medical and ontology specialists, who explained that it was completed along the dimensions of accuracy, extensibility, usability, and completeness. This small scale accurately answered 36 well-defined competency questions. Among others, the RAO solution system presents a structured, interoperable, and improved rehabilitation data organization, simplifying queries to bring about better patient care in the three centers.