Home care expert systems for ambient assisted living: A multi-agent approach

The ageing process of population of the First World countries is increasing the interest towards solutions to improve the quality of life of elderly or disabled people and their families, providing an economically sustainable healthcare. Thus Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) are moving towards the Artificial Intelligence field to develop modular, adaptable and intelligent systems to cope with changing needs that characterize the life of people with chronic diseases. These systems should find smart and simple ways to improve the patient quality of life, enhancing at the same time the communication between the system, the assisted person, his family and the medical staff, acting also as a filter of information that provides useful and significant data. This paper introduces the basic architecture of an expert system for AAL: the Virtual Carer (VC). It has to be understood as an IT system modelling a distributed, reliable and modular sensor network composed by biometric and ambient sensors, being able to communicate with an assisted person, to monitor his health conditions and to control the environment around him. The main goal of the system is to help an elderly patient with his daily activities ensuring his security. The proposed system is based on a multi-agent architecture to ensure its flexibility and interoperability: new devices or sensors can be added simply adding new agents, thanks to the standardization of agent communication. The system includes also a reasoning part based on Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) paradigm, trying to model the behaviours of a human caregiver.