Intelligent e-Health System for Patient and Elderly People Monitoring Using Multi Agents System
Ayman M. Mansour |Pages: 15-37|

Abstract— In this paper, an intelligent e-Health system for patients and elderly people monitoring using multi agents system is designed and developed. The developed system is highly needed in rural areas because of the inadequate number of available specialized physicians or nurses. The proposed system will enhance the process of health condition monitoring compared with the existing system which relies on patients themselves. The proposed system can save patients life through continuous online monitoring of their medical conditions by specialized physicians not necessarily available in the same geographical areas. The monitoring system is based on a multiagent system which consists of Physician Agents and Elderly Agents. Both agents are supported with a fuzzy decision mechanism that makes initial diagnosis regarding the medical condition of the patient/elderly. The issue of how physician and elderly agents, located in different places, are working collaboratively and proactively communicate with each other has been addressed in this paper. We have described the architecture, design and implementation of an elderly agent and a physician agent. To evaluate the performance of the system, we have implemented a four-agent system: two Elderly Agents and two Physician Agents. We also generated simulation results. We choose four agents because the size is representative enough while computing time is still reasonable. From the software standpoint, the four agents collaboratively worked one another as designed. Two physicians on our research team independently reviewed the fuzzy decision mechanism performance. Evaluation shows excellent agreement between physicians and the fuzzy decision mechanism. Having such e-health system will speed up and improve communication between different medical units in the health system and drive healthcare costs down for the benefit of patients.