Combining Artificial Intelligence and NetMedicine for Ambient Assisted Living: A distributed BDI-based expert system

World population is shifting towards older ages: according to recent estimates there will be 1.5 billion people over 65 years old in 2050. Local governments, international institutions, care organizations and industry are fostering the research community to find solutions to face the unprecedented challenges raised by population ageing. A combination of Artificial Intelligence and NetMedicine could be ideal to face these challenges: they provide the means to develop an intelligent system and simultaneously to distribute it over a network, allowing the communication over the internet, if needed. Hence, the authors present a Multi-Agent Architecture for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL): it is the model for a system to manage a distributed sensor network composed by ambient and biometric sensors. The system should analyse data and pro-active ly decide to trigger alarms if anomalies are detected. The authors tested the architecture implementing a prototypical Multi-Agent System (MAS), based on Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) paradigm: the Virtual Carer