Applications of Policy Based Agents in Wireless Body Sensor Mesh Networks for Patient Health Monitoring

Abstract

Considerable research interest in using wireless and mobile technologies in patient health monitoring exists, particularly in hospitals and nursing homes. For health monitoring, an intelligent agent based hierarchical architecture was presented in the authors’ previous work. The technique of monitoring and notifying the health of patients using an intelligent agent, to the concerned hospital personnel, was proposed. This paper presents the details of the functioning of four main intelligent agents, i.e., the nurse agent, the sensor agent, the database agent, and the ward boy agent, for intimating the health information to the concerned doctor in the hospital, based on certain policies relevant to the hospital. The policies worked based on the temperature parameter monitored by the nurse agent. This paper considers an example of the physiological parameter i.e., the body temperature monitoring, for policy based agent implementation. The implementation was carried out using JADE-LEAP agent development kit.