A multiagent system enhancing home-care health services for chronic disease management

IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed. 2005 Dec;9(4):528-37. doi: 10.1109/titb.2005.847511.

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Databases, Factual
  • Decision Support Systems, Clinical / organization & administration*
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Home Care Services / organization & administration*
  • Information Dissemination / methods
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / methods
  • Medical Records Systems, Computerized / organization & administration*
  • Telemedicine / methods*
  • Therapy, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • User-Computer Interface