Modeling intelligent agents to integrate a patient monitoring system

Abstract

ICU units are a good environment for the application of in- telligent systems in the healthcare arena, due to its critical environment that require diagnose, monitor and treatment of patients with serious illnesses. An intelligent decision support system - INTCare, was devel- oped and tested in CHP, a hospital in Oporto, Portugal. The need to detect the presence or absence of the patient in bed, in order to stop the collection of redundant data concerning about the patient vital status led to the development of an RFID locating and monitoring system - PaLMS, able to uniquely and unambiguously identify a patient and per- ceive its presence in bed in an ubiquitous manner, making the process of data collection and alert event more accurate. An intelligent multi-agent system for integration of PaLMS in the hospital’s platform for interoper- ability (AIDA) was also developed, using the characteristics of intelligent agents for the communication process between the RFID equipment, the INTCare module and the Patient Management System, using the HL7 standard embedded in agent behaviours.