Extending a patient monitoring system with identification and localisation

Intensive Care Units (ICUs) are a good environment for the application of intelligent systems in the healthcare area because it requires diagnosing, monitoring, and treatment of patients with critical illness. An intelligent decision support system, named INTCare, was developed and tested in CHP, a hospital center in Oporto. The need to detect the presence or absence of the patient in room, in order to stop the collection of redundant data concerning about the patient vital status led to the development of an RFID localisation and monitoring system - PaLMS, able to uniquely and unambiguously identify a patient and perceive its presence in room, making the process of data collection and alert event more accurate. The solution was the implementation of an intelligent multi-agent system that connects the Patient Management System module, the INTCare module and the RFID equipment, using the HL7 standard embedded in agents behaviours.