A Multiagent System Enhancing Home-Care Health Services for Chronic Disease Management

Abstract

In this paper, a multiagent system (MAS) is presented, aiming to enhance monitoring, surveillance, and educational services of a generic medical contact center (MCC) for chronic disease management. In such a home-care scenario, a persistent need arises for efficiently monitoring the patient contacts and the MCC's functionality, in order to effectively manage and interpret the large volume of medical data collected during the patient sessions with the system, and to assess the use of MCC resources. Software agents were adopted to provide the means to accomplish such real-time information-processing tasks, due to their autonomous, reactive and/or proactive nature, and their effectiveness in dynamic environments by incorporating coordination strategies. Specifically, the objective of the MAS is to monitor the MCC environment, detect important cases, and inform the healthcare and administrative personnel via alert messages, notifications, recommendations, and reports, prompting them for actions. The main aim of this paper is to present the overall design and implementation of a proposed MAS, emphasizing its functional model and architecture, as well as on the agent interactions and the knowledge-sharing mechanism incorporated, in the context of a generic MCC.

An Agent-Based Approach to Care in Independent Living

“…In the remote care field they gave special mention to Agineru [17], a multi-agent system that monitors and processes psychological parameters on a portable device and enables physicians to access the data through a web application based on a centralized database. Besides, Koutkias et al [10] presented a multi-agent system for the management of chronic diseases that detects anomalous cases and informs personnel; and Cervantes et al [3] proposed a similar system to [10] for pervasive management that collects and evaluates physiological data collected by sensor agent in order to detect user's symptoms by patient's agent and to report on the situation to doctor's agents.…”

Emerging medical informatics with case-based reasoning for aiding clinical decision in multi-agent system

“…., 4). 400 Besides the provided example, there are 6 diseases or biological 401 processes that were investigated for testing, including breast can-402 cer, acute diarrhea, addiction, antibiotics and infectious diseases, [11], evaluating the health of diets [19], etc. Table 2).…”

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“…It presents approaches focused on the remote monitoring of patients such as:  The Aingeru system supports intelligent, permanent and persistent monitoring of elderly people through the PDA data [11].  Koutkias et al [12] present a system to ensure monitoring, surveillance and educational services for the management of chronic diseases.…”