How to effectively support the caregivers to manage behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) has been a long standing, big challenge. Person-centred care for people with dementia is yet to be developed and implemented in residential aged care facilities (RACFs). To date, a large volume of personal health data has been generated in the process of dementia care, such as nursing documentation, medical records, relative and friends’ inputs. However, the valuable information in these data sets has not been effectively used to guide person-centred dementia care. Application of data mining and machine learning technology in personal health data can offer enormous opportunity for us to better understand a person with dementia, what makes the person happy or upset, which symptoms indicate the onset of BPSD, etc.

For health data science to achieve this promise, first we need to code dementia knowledge in a computer readable format, i.e., to build a computer readable dementia care data classification system, which we call ontology. Therefore, the aim of this PhD project is to develop a dementia care ontology that represents the knowledge of dementia and dementia care in computer-readable format. This ontology can provide a tool for mapping information from different computer data sources to generate insight about a person with dementia and how to better manage the person’s symptoms of dementia for caregivers. It can also be used to extract quality dementia and dementia care information efficiently; and to produce easily understandable health reports for a variety of users.

Supervisors: Associate Professor Ping Yu, Professor Chao Deng, Dr Hui Chen (Rita) Chang, Dr Sim Lau