Ontology-Based Modeling for Newborn Behavior Simulation during Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

This chapter concerns the formulation of a methodology and its implementation to elaborate a training simulator for medical staff who may be confronted with the critical situations of newborn resuscitation. The simulator reproduces the different cardiopulmonary pathological behaviors of newborns, the working environment of resuscitation rooms, and the monitoring and control environment of the learners by a teacher. Conceptual models of newborn behaviors combined with the cardiopulmonary resuscitation gestures have been developed. The methodological process is jointly using cognitive approaches with formal modeling and simulation. Cognitive approaches are mobilized to elaborate application ontologies to be the bases for the development of the conceptual models and the specification of the simulator. Ontologies have been developed on the bases of a corpus of academic documents, return on experience documents, and practitioner interviews, by means of the knowledge-oriented design (KOD) method. A discrete event formalism has been used to formalize the conceptual models of the newborn behaviors. As a result, a simulator has been built to train medical practitioners to face situations, which are reported to potentially cause errors, and thus improve the safety of the resuscitation gestures.