Providing home care using context-aware agents

This paper presents an ambient intelligence based architecture model that defines intelligent hybrid agents. These agents have the ability to obtain automatic and real-time information about the context using a set of technologies, such as radio frequency identification, wireless networks and wireless control devices. The architecture can be implemented on a wide diversity of dynamic environments, especially for providing home care to elderly and dependent people

A Distributed Ambient Intelligence Based Multi-Agent System for Alzheimer Health Care

This chapter presents ALZ-MAS (Alzheimer multi-agent system), an ambient intelligence (AmI)-based multi-agent system aimed at enhancing the assistance and health care for Alzheimer patients. The system makes use of several context-aware technologies that allow it to automatically obtain information from users and the environment in an evenly distributed way, focusing on the characteristics of ubiquity, awareness, intelligence, mobility, etc., all of which are concepts defined by AmI. ALZ-MAS makes use of a services oriented multi-agent architecture, called flexible user and services oriented multi-agent architecture, to distribute resources and enhance its performance. It is demonstrated that a SOA approach is adequate to build distributed and highly dynamic AmI-based multi-agent systems

An intelligent assistant for patient health care

The Patient Advocate is designed to be an intelligent assistant for patient-centered health care. Residing on a home computer or special-purpose device and operating within an extended health-care information network, the Patient Advocate will extend medical expertise into the outpatient setting. It will have remote access to the patient’s medical record, an understanding of the patient’s health status and history, and a model of the patient’s interest in health-related issues, preferences for modes and contents of interaction, etc. The Patient Advocate is being designed to provide three kinds of functions. First, it will assist the patient in managing continuing ambulatory conditions, for example chronic problems such as diabetes, special normal conditions such as prenatal care, and wellness issues such as diet, exercise, and stress. Second, it will provide health-related information by allowing the patient to interact with the online health-care information network and scan media resources to suggest information of interest. Third, it will act as a remote triage point for clinical services by coordinating patient-relevant information such as reminding the patient when a visit to the clinic is indicated. We describe a prototype of the Patient Advocate which is designed to support obstetrics patients at risk of gestational diabetes. It is important that the Patient Advocate is platform-independent, runs on widely available hosts, and has access to various Internet resources. Therefore, it is implemented in Java and is Internet accessible. 1. Patient-Centered Care is Needed In recent years, several knowledge-based systems have been introduced to support health care providers (mainly clinicians) with the monitoring of critical care patients and to assist them with diagnostic decisions and therapy planning (Uckun 1994b). These systems range from simple intelligent alarms to sophisticated systems for anesthesia monitoring or ventilator management (e.g.