International Journal of Engineering Business Management (Feb 2011)
Building Distributed E-Healthcare for Elderly Using RFID and Multi-Agent
Abstract
With the advancement of living standards and healthcare systems, there have been significant improvements in life preservation worldwide over this century which are reflected in prolonged life expectancy and are enlarging the aging population. In the foreseeable future, the home care environment is recognized as the first line of defense for health and medical care via proper implementation of state-of-the-art information technologies. For instance, in the home care environment, the tracking of physiological information not only circumvents the high-cost medical manpower and resources, but the signs of abnormal health can also be detected further by long-term and sustaining health records. In this paper the development of an intelligent home healthcare system based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and the mobile agent technologies is described. The system enables the RFID home care service and physiological assessment based on the concept of Location-based Service (LBS). Additionally, by coupling the technologies of dynamic detection and motion detection, a home care system for real-time safety has been designed to prevent the elderly from accidental falling.