Agent-based ambient intelligence for healthcare

Healthcare professionals, working in hospitals experience a high level of mobility due to their need for accessing patients’ clinical records, medical devices distributed throughout the premises, and colleagues with whom they collaborate. In this paper, we present how autonomous agents provide capabilities of intelligence and proactivity to healthcare environments furnished with ubiquitous computing and medical devices, resulting thus, in an ambient intelligence (AmI) system. Autonomous agents enable ubiquitous technology to respond to users’ particular conditions and demands. To support the building of this type of intelligent systems, we created the SALSA development framework. SALSA is a middleware designed to support the development of AmI environments based on autonomous agents. We illustrate the facilities provided by SALSA and its flexibility to iteratively implement an AmI system for a healthcare application scenario.