An Ambient Intelligent Framework for Residential Monitoring of Dementia Patients using Fuzzy Agents

In this paper an ambient intelligent-based framework is proposed for the monitoring of dementia patients living in their own homes. Within this framework 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 behaviour changes to care providers to enable them to make better-informed assessments of the patient’s cognitive abilities and changing care needs.