Agents in Home Care: A Case Study

Communications in Medical and Care Compunetics

2011

World population is ageing and increasingly scarce resources are required to cover the needs of everyone adequately. Medical conditions, especially memory problems, restrict the daily life of a broad slice of the elderly population, affect their independence. To prevent this, providing the right care and assistance while having in mind the costs implicated is essential. One possible path is to work with resources that we already have today and create innovative solutions to achieve the required level of support. There are not many solution either technological or not to prevent memory loss. In this work we present a possible solution aimed at restoring or maintaining the independence of elderly people, through the use of so-called Memory Assistants. We thus present an Intelligent Multi-Agent Memory Assistant designed to help people with memory problems remember their events and activities. The implementation of an event manager, free time manger, medication remainder and a sensory system, to manage and monitor the user, we aim to improve their quality of life and increase their independence.

“…The architecture of iGenda is based on the agent paradigm [18]. Every core action has an individual agent to support the activity and the decision, as it can be seen in Fig.…”

Section: Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

An Intelligent Multi-Agent Memory Assistant

Communications in Medical and Care Compunetics

2011

“…The iGenda is a hierarchy of Agents ( Fig. 1) that follow specific tasks and protocols [6], intended to deal with its user's expectations. The main agents are the Agenda Manager (AM), the Free Time Manager (FTM), the Conflicts Manager (CM) and the Interface Manager (IM).…”

Section: Igenda: Scheduling and Organizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We approached the problem by constructing a Multi-Agent System [6] that is able to support Communication and Decision Making Agents, each one with unique characteristics in a non-competitive and parallel functioning environment so agents can separately process different calendars and events, making different choices. They obviously cannot write to the same calendar at the same time so they are also non-cancelling each other.…”

Section: Fig 1 Modules Scheme Of Igendamentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-agent Personal Memory Assistant

Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing

et al. 2010

Self Cite

Abstract. Memory is one of our most precious goods has it gives us the ability to store, retain and recall information thus giving a meaning to our past and help us to envision our future, dreams and expectations. However, ageing decreases the capacity of remembering and the capacity to store new memories, thus affecting our life quality. These presented problems configure a social and human dilemma. With the presented work we intend to address some of these problems, thru the use of the Personal Memory Assistant (PMA) concept in order to help its user to remember things and occurrences in a proactive manner. We will also address socialization and relaxation events that should be part of the user's life. With the use of a Multi-Agent System to implement the PMA, the objectives can be achieved in a ubiquitous and highly configurable manner. It is presented here the platform concept, scheme and the agent characteristics and their contribution to each and every agent.

“…The PMA aims to help persons with memory loss, by sustaining all the daily events and warning the user when it is time to put them into action. It will be able to receive information delivered by any source and organise it in the most convenient way, according to predefined standards and protocols, so that the user will not need to manually plan or schedule specific events and tasks [6,7,8].…”

Section: Igendamentioning

confidence: 99%

iGenda: An Event Scheduler for Common Users and Centralised Systems

Laredo

Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing

et al. 2010

Self Cite

The world is walking towards an aged society as a consequence of the increasing rate of longevity in modern cultures. With age comes the fact that memory decreases its efficiency and memory loss starts to surge. Within this context, iGenda is a Personal Memory Assistant (PMA) designed to run on a personal computer or mobile device that tries to help final-users in keeping track of their daily activities. In addition, iGenda has included a Centralised Management System (CMS) on the side of an hospital-like institution, the CMS stands a level above the PMA and the goal is to manage the medical staff (e.g. physicians and nurses) daily work schedule taking into account the patients and resources, communicating directly with the PMA of the patient. This paper presents the platform concept, the overall architecture of the system and the key features on the different agents and components.