A fuzzy ambient intelligent agents approach for monitoring disease progression of dementia patients

In this paper, we discuss the development of an ambient intelligent-based system for the monitoring of dementia patients living in their own homes. Within this system groups of unobtrusive wireless sensor devices can be deployed at specific locations within a patient’s home and accessed via standardized interfaces provided through an open middleware platform. For each sensor group intelligent agents are used to learn fuzzy rules, which model the patient’s habitual behaviours in the environment. An online rule adaptation technique is applied to facilitate short-term tuning of the learnt behaviours, and long-term tracking of behaviour changes which could be due to the effects of cognitive decline caused from dementia. The proposed system reports macro level behaviour changes and micro level perception drift to care providers to enable them to make better-informed assessments of the patient’s cognitive abilities and changing care needs. We demonstrate experiments in a real pervasive computing environment, in which our intelligent agent approach can learn to model the user’s behaviours and allow online adaptation of its model to better approximate the learnt behaviours and identify long-term macro-level behaviour changes, which could be attributed to cognitive decline. We also show an example of how the user’s perceptions for thermal comfort may be captured and visualised to provide a means by which micro-level perception changes can be monitored.