- About Me
- Publications
About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in Health Informatics and Information Systems at the University of Ottawa. I also hold an Adjunct Faculty position at the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University. Before that, I was a Research Associate and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the NICHE Research Group at Dalhousie University. I was a teaching assistant for 6 years at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, obtaining the degree of Doctor in Sciences in 2013.
Research Interests
My research interests lie at the crossroads of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), Information Systems (IS) engineering, and Mobile Computing. In particular, I am interested in applying these technologies to innovate domains such as healthcare, law, government and business.
Publications
2020
William Van Woensel; Patrice C Roy; Syed Sibte Raza Abidi; Samina Raza Abidi
Indoor location identification of patients for directing virtual care: An AI approach using machine learning and knowledge-based methods Journal Article
In: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, vol. 108, pp. 101931, 2020, ISSN: 0933-3657.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Activities of daily living, Ambient assisted living, Ambient Intelligence, Ambient sensors, Chronic disease self-management, Data fusion, eHealth Platform, Indoor Localization, Machine Learning, Self-Management, Semantic Web, Virtual care
@article{VANWOENSEL2020101931,
title = {Indoor location identification of patients for directing virtual care: An AI approach using machine learning and knowledge-based methods},
author = {William Van Woensel and Patrice C Roy and Syed Sibte Raza Abidi and Samina Raza Abidi},
url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0933365720301275
https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bTwR3KEGaD3xR},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artmed.2020.101931},
issn = {0933-3657},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-01-01},
journal = {Artificial Intelligence in Medicine},
volume = {108},
pages = {101931},
abstract = {In a digitally enabled healthcare setting, we posit that an individual’s current location is pivotal for supporting many virtual care services—such as tailoring educational content towards an individual’s current location, and, hence, current stage in an acute care process; improving activity recognition for supporting self-management in a home-based setting; and guiding individuals with cognitive decline through daily activities in their home. However, unobtrusively estimating an individual’s indoor location in real-world care settings is still a challenging problem. Moreover, the needs of location-specific care interventions go beyond absolute coordinates and require the individual’s discrete semantic location; i.e., it is the concrete type of an individual’s location (e.g., exam vs. waiting room; bathroom vs. kitchen) that will drive the tailoring of educational content or recognition of activities. We utilized Machine Learning methods to accurately identify an individual’s discrete location, together with knowledge-based models and tools to supply the associated semantics of identified locations. We considered clustering solutions to improve localization accuracy at the expense of granularity; and investigate sensor fusion-based heuristics to rule out false location estimates. We present an AI-driven indoor localization approach that integrates both data-driven and knowledge-based processes and artifacts. We illustrate the application of our approach in two compelling healthcare use cases, and empirically validated our localization approach at the emergency unit of a large Canadian pediatric hospital.},
keywords = {Activities of daily living, Ambient assisted living, Ambient Intelligence, Ambient sensors, Chronic disease self-management, Data fusion, eHealth Platform, Indoor Localization, Machine Learning, Self-Management, Semantic Web, Virtual care},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
2015
William Van Woensel; Patrice C. Roy; Samina Raza Abidi; Syed Sibte Raza Abidi
A Mobile and Intelligent Patient Diary for Chronic Disease Self-Management Proceedings Article
In: MEDINFO 2015: eHealth-enabled Health - Proceedings of the 15th World Congress on Health and Biomedical Informatics, Sao Paulo, Brazil, pp. 118–122, IOS Press, 2015, ISBN: 978-1-61499-563-0.
Links | BibTeX | Tags: Chronic Disease Management, Mobile Health, Patient Diary, Patient Empowerment, Self-Management
@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/medinfo/WoenselRAA15,
title = {A Mobile and Intelligent Patient Diary for Chronic Disease Self-Management},
author = {William Van Woensel and Patrice C. Roy and Samina Raza Abidi and Syed Sibte Raza Abidi},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-564-7-118},
doi = {10.3233/978-1-61499-564-7-118},
isbn = {978-1-61499-563-0},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-08-23},
booktitle = {MEDINFO 2015: eHealth-enabled Health - Proceedings of the 15th World Congress on Health and Biomedical Informatics, Sao Paulo, Brazil},
pages = {118--122},
publisher = {IOS Press},
keywords = {Chronic Disease Management, Mobile Health, Patient Diary, Patient Empowerment, Self-Management},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}