  Personal health libraries (PHLs) provide a single point of secure access to
patients digital health data and enable the integration of knowledge stored in
their digital health profiles with other sources of global knowledge. PHLs can
help empower caregivers and health care providers to make informed decisions
about patients health by understanding medical events in the context of their
lives. This paper reports the implementation of a mobile health digital
intervention that incorporates both digital health data stored in patients PHLs
and other sources of contextual knowledge to deliver tailored recommendations
for improving self-care behaviors in diabetic adults. We conducted a thematic
assessment of patient functional and nonfunctional requirements that are
missing from current EHRs based on evidence from the literature. We used the
results to identify the technologies needed to address those requirements. We
describe the technological infrastructures used to construct, manage, and
integrate the types of knowledge stored in the PHL. We leverage the Social
Linked Data (Solid) platform to design a fully decentralized and privacy-aware
platform that supports interoperability and care integration. We provided an
initial prototype design of a PHL and drafted a use case scenario that involves
four actors to demonstrate how the proposed prototype can be used to address
user requirements, including the construction and management of the PHL and its
utilization for developing a mobile app that queries the knowledge stored and
integrated into the PHL in a private and fully decentralized manner to provide
better recommendations. The proposed PHL helps patients and their caregivers
take a central role in making decisions regarding their health and equips their
health care providers with informatics tools that support the collection and
interpretation of the collected knowledge.
