Intelligent mobile agents in elderly care

Society is currently facing the ageing of the population which, together with the increasing engagement of both men and women in out of home work activities, demand new solutions for taking care of elderly people. Inexpensive support systems for elderly people staying alone at home, allowing care and health centers to remotely observe and help them, are becoming feasible with today's technology. In this paper, an architecture for such a system based on the Internet and extensively exploiting the multi-agent systems paradigm is presented that includes both stationary and mobile agents. Furthermore, an adaptation mechanism that allows mobile agents to adapt themselves to diversified local environments is presented, including prototype implementation details. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.