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.

Ocena rozpowszechnienia, powodów i form użycia tak zwanych "dopalaczy" przez uczestników ankiety internetowej Prevalence, reasons, and forms of use of legal highs by internet-based survey participants Maciej R. Mazurkiewicz, Michał G ł o g o w s k i , Dobrosława M r o w i ń s k a , Marcin Pakulski, Michał Maty j a s z c z y k , Przemysław K a r d a s I Zakład Medycyny Rodzinnej UM w Łodzi Kierownik: prof. dr hab. n. med. P. Kardas Summary Aim. The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence, causes and forms of the use of legal highs in Poland. Methods. The study was based on an original questionnaire and was carried out through the Internet before banning of the legal highs in Poland. Results. The study covered 3013 people, aged 24.7 + /-6.9, of which 9.3% admitted to use legal highs (6.5% of women, and 14.7% of men, P < 0.01). The highest percentage of legal highs users was in the age groups 19-25 years (10.6%). Most people taking legal highs did so less than 1 time per month (71.8%). The most common reasons for taking legal highs were curiosity (46.4%), the desire to have fun (26.8%), and to improve the well-being (10.7%). Legal highs were most often used during meetings with friends (68.9% of cases), and social events (52.1%). The majority of their users adopted other risky behaviors: 56.4% took them with alcohol, 86.4% tried narcotics at least once, and 13.9% decided to try narcotics after trying legal highs. Conclusions. 1. Among the respondents of the online survey 9.3% admitted to use legal highs. 2. A typical profile of a legal high user is a young man, using them out of curiosity, to improve the well-being or just for fun, usually in social situations. 3. Initiatives undertaken to reduce the use of legal highs have to consider the social context.

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