Achieving human-agent teamwork in eHealth based pervasive intelligent environments

Pervasive intelligent environments, such as digital homes, offer huge potentials for eHealth services. However, there is a question as to how best to manage (i.e. configure and program) these systems. The majority of solutions to-date rely exclusively on either end users or autonomous agents to manage the environment, which may not be suitable for all users and in certain situations, especially in eHealth applications where uses may have very specific requirements that can change considerably over time. In this work-in-progress paper we argue that human-agent teamwork is vital for the adoption of future pervasive computing systems into our everyday lives; we discuss these issues, exposing the problem of exclusive management and we explore a solution, presenting our novel architecture for an adjustable autonomy agent that enables human-agent based teamwork. This work contributes to the PAL project: a collaborative research effort between University of Essex, BT, University of Cambridge and Ericsson.