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Agent-based execution of personalised home care treatments

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Abstract

Home Care services are notoriously difficult to deliver efficiently, due to the heterogeneity of the involved actors and the usual co-morbidity of the patients assisted at home. The K4Care platform proposes an agent-based three-layered architecture aimed at addressing these two issues and facilitate the provision of these services. The development of the platform was supported by a methodology to help the automation of the modelling and implementation of the multi-agent system. The intelligent agents of the platform, which personify the Home Care domain actors, have the capability to guide the execution of administrative and medical processes, driving the flux of knowledge and control among all the involved professionals, simplifying their interactions and capturing new medical knowledge emerging from physicians. The platform also provides tools that allow medical practitioners to develop personalised treatments, adapted to the clinical and social circumstances of each patient and based on the standard international recommendations for the most frequent Home Care pathologies. The paper describes the architecture of the system, how personalised treatments are created, and how they are executed through the co-ordinated work of agents. A comparison with other relevant guideline execution systems and an evaluation of the actual state of the work are also provided.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, Intelligent Technologies for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition (ITAKA) Research Group, University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain

    David Isern, Antonio Moreno & David Sánchez

  2. Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Sztaki), Kende u. 13–17, 1111, Budapest, Hungary

    Ákos Hajnal, Gianfranco Pedone & László Z. Varga

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  1. David Isern
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  2. Antonio Moreno
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  3. David Sánchez
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  4. Ákos Hajnal
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  5. Gianfranco Pedone
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  6. László Z. Varga
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Correspondence to David Isern.

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Isern, D., Moreno, A., Sánchez, D. et al. Agent-based execution of personalised home care treatments. Appl Intell 34, 155–180 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-009-0187-6

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