Agent-Based Alarm Management in a Palliative Care Unit

Intelligent Agent Alarm Systems

Sensors attached to an intelligent mechanism that decides whether or not some condition has been met.

This agent alerts other agents in the system such that they may respond to this event.

This has many applications within emergency management.

A lot of this has to do with mechanical sensors and exact measurements (parachuting forest fire sensors, earthquake monitors, floating tsunami sensors, nuclear reactor agents)

However, there are many cases where such measurements are inexact and relative...

Health Care Application

Nealon and Moreno (2003) suggest that agents are useful in health care.

Agents in this field should use AI techniques and be...

Palliative Care Unit

Palliative Care is for terminally ill patients who require...

Much of this is done manually and through paper evaluations

The use of agents and alarms can improve the process

Issues with Health Care Agents

Agents and sensors in healthcare systems have different concerns than mechanical sensors

PalliaSys

Moreno, et al (2005) introduce PalliaSys

Agents

Design

PalliaSys Design

Alarms

Two types of alarms:

Alarm Evaluations

There is an interface in the Doctor Agent to create Alarms

They are based upon (0-10 scale) patient evaluations (from the Patient Agent) on certain criteria:

  • Pain
  • Weakness
  • Depression
  • Anxiety
  • Nausea
  • Sleepiness
  • Hunger
  • Well-Being
  • Breathing Problems
  • Dry Mouth

Specifying an Alarm

Doctors can create simple rules to trigger alarms per patient:

Extreme Weakness: (Weakness > 7) and (Pain > 8)

This may describe an abnormal condition for a particular patient.

When a patient evaluation is filed, it may trigger this alert.

The doctor will be notified via the user interface on the Doctor Agent.

Rules can Stack

Doctors are free to write more complex rules.

Dangerous Weakness: (Hunger < 3) and Extreme Weakness

In this case, it specifies a more severe rule based upon another one.

Some patients may need certain rules, but other patients may require more severe alerts to be monitored.

Evolution Alarms

Evolution Alarms are monitors for events that occur over time.

Alarm rules, since human evaluated, are relative.

Therefore, set alarms for changes over time.

Fast Weakness Increase: d(Weakness) > 2

Alarm fires when a evaluation has increased by 2 from the previous evaluation.

Over time

Perhaps, a condition changes slightly over a period of time.

However, a doctor may still want to be alerted when evaluations show this trend.

Extreme Pain Increase: d(Pain, 28 days) > 4

Now, it is across all evaluations from the last 4 weeks.

Alarm Definition

To handle certain security and moral implications, the alarm is strictly defined.

Benefits

References

J. Nealon and A. Moreno. Agent-based Health care systems. Pages 1-18. Whitestein series on Agent Technology. Birkhauser, 2003.

A. Moreno and D. Riaño and A. Valls. Agent-based alarm management in a Palliative Care Unit. Pages 60-66. III Workshop on Agents Applied in Health Care en IJCAI2005 Edinburgh Actas del workshop, 2005.

/

#
bring up a menu skip to a particular slide