An Ontology For Rehabilitation Assessment: Case Study Palestine

Effective tools are essential for physiotherapists to manage disabled patients. Rehabilitation
knowledge, including assessments, goal setting, interventions, and outcomes, supports
patient therapy plans. However, the direct applicability of controlled rehabilitation studies
to diverse real-world patients is limited. Rehabilitation data comes from various sources,
presenting challenges in integrating these assessments centrally and ensuring
interoperability. Ontology can produce shared semantics and machine-readable, reusable,
and interoperable rehabilitation knowledge, which is crucial to managing patients'
disabilities. However, the existing ontologies for the rehabilitation domain are lacking in
Physical Therapy (PT) and Occupational Therapy (OT) standard assessments and
comprehensive rehabilitation domain knowledge. The current rehabilitation ontology,
Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PMR) contains concepts related to PT and OT
assessments. For the Palestine domain, PMR contains some knowledge that can be used for
OT (Functional Independence Measure (FIM)) standard assessments. Nevertheless, many
of the standard assessments used in Palestine do not exist in the PMR ontology.
Rehabilitation data in Palestine consists of unstructured, semi-structured, and not well
organized as well as manual rehabilitation assessment. Therefore, integrating the
rehabilitation assessments with the patient’s medical reports will be helpful for medical
experts. However, populating the ontology with data from patient’s profiles is the second
challenge in this research. A new Rehabilitation Assessment Ontology (RAO) is proposed
in this research and contains the PT and OT standard assessments and patient information
for the Palestine domain. Next, the 101-ontology development method is used to develop
the ontology. The development of the RAO starts with interviews with medical experts to
collect knowledge about rehabilitation assessment. Expert knowledge is collected from
three different rehabilitation centers in Palestine: (Specialized Al-Ibtisameh Al-Jamelah
Physiotherapy Center (BJC), Hashmi for Specialized Physiotherapy and Spinal
Manipulation (HSPT), and Future Magic (FM)). Patient information is extracted from 120
patient profiles. New rehabilitation gazetteers have been generated to be populated
automatically into the RAO. Finally, the evaluation of the RAO is the third problem in this
thesis and it was done by medical and ontology experts. Based on the evaluation, the RAO
has been able to answer all the developed Competency Questions (CQs). The CQs were
developed based on these interviews with medical experts, reflecting the assessment and
treatment protocols they follow. Additionally, two ontology experts endorsed the RAO as
having consistency, extensibility, ease of use, and completion. The proposed RAO is an
effective data management system for the three rehabilitation centers. The unstructured
data for rehabilitation in Palestine will be successfully organized, and queries will be
successfully applied through the proposed RAO.