Effective use of personal health records to support emergency services

Smart City systems capture and exchange information with the aim to improve public services. Particularly, healthcare data could help emergency services to plan resources and make life-saving decisions. However, the delivery of healthcare information to emergency bodies must be balanced against the concerns related to citizens’ privacy. Besides, emergency services face challenges in interpreting this data; the heterogeneity of sources and a large amount of information available represent a significant barrier. In this paper, we focus on a case study involving the use of personal health records to support emergency services in the context of a fire building evacuation. We propose a methodology involving a knowledge engineering approach and a common-sense knowledge base to address the problem of deriving useful information from health records and, at the same time, preserve citizens’ privacy. We perform extensive experiments involving a synthetic dataset of health records and a curated gold standard to demonstrate how our approach allows us to identify vulnerable people and interpret their particular needs while avoiding the disclosure of personal information.