MIMO: Multi-Agent System for Personal Health Monitoring

Zusammenfassung

According to previsions, Spanish population over 65 years old will soon be an important fraction. For the EU region, old-age dependency ratios will more than double in 2000 to 2050, decreasing, at the same time, the ratio of persons of working age to every elderly people. These data show the need for some helping technologies that make possible to deal with this scenario. One of the possibilities explored is the use of some kind of intelligence at home. This chapter describes the current status of the ambient intelligence (Aarts, Rabaey, & Weber, 2005) initiatives that link multi-agent technologies with personal monitoring for health and wellbeing. The aim is to explore various enabling technologies based on environmental intelligence, by means of which the user interacts with his or her home in various scenarios: home assistance and wellbeing, entertainment, identity management in a home environment, and location management in a home. All these possibilities are intended to satisfy the objective of home assistance and wellbeing, and it fits well within Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme (AAL) (“Ambient Assisted Living,” 2008) partly funded by the European Commission. The authors will focus this technology on a personal health monitor integrated with the multi-agent system for home environments created by Telefónica R+D in cooperation with the Departamento de Informática y Automática of the University of Salamanca and the Computer Science Department of the University of Valladolid, Spain. This research aims to explore the use of several device discovery technologies and ambient intelligence techniques in order to allow the user interaction at home as transparent as possible. To achieve this goal a multi-agent system is proposed, focussing on knowledge representation for multi-agent system communication and personal health monitoring.