Research focus: the focus of this research is in the definition of programmable expert personal health systems to monitor patients affected by chronic diseases using agent oriented programming and mobile computing to represent the interaction happening amongst the components of the system. The paper also discusses issues of knowledge representation within the medical domain when dealing with temporal patterns concerning the physiological values of the patient.Research method: We evaluate the presented agent based PHS against its scalability, by comparing it with a centralized approach and then we also use the data of 21 diabetic patients to evaluate the accuracy of a set of dynamic monitoring rules defined.Results: The evaluation concerning the scalability of the system illustrates the fact that a centralized approach towards monitoring chronic illnesses is not scalable and an approach making use of mobile computing and agents experts is more likely to satisfy the needs of next generation PHSs. The evaluation also highlights the advantages of having dynamic rules to monitor patients, evaluating the precision of three of such rules. Conclusions: PHSs are becoming an adopted technology to deal with the surge of patients affected by chronic illnesses. In this paper we discussed architectural choices to make an agent based PHS more scalable by using a distributed mobile computing approach. We also discussed how to model the medical knowledge in the PHS in such a way that this is modifiable at run time. The evaluation highlights the necessity of distributing the reasoning to the mobile part of the system and the necessity to define modifiable rules to be able to deal with the change in lifestyle of the patients affected by chronic illnesses.
The development of pervasive healthcare systems consists of applying ubiquitous computing in the healthcare context. The systems developed in this research field have the goals of offering better healthcare services, promoting the well-being of the people, and assisting healthcare professionals in their tasks. The aim of the chapter is to give an overview of the main research efforts in the area of pervasive healthcare systems and to identify which are the main research challenges in this topic of research. Furthermore, the authors review the current state of the art for these kinds of systems with respect to some of the research challenges identified. In particular, the authors focus on contributions done regarding interoperability, scalability, and security of these systems.
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