Monitoring patient health using policy based agents in wireless body sensor mesh networks

There is presently considerable research interest in using wireless and mobile technologies in patient health monitoring particularly in hospitals and nursing homes. For health monitoring, an intelligent agent based hierarchical architecture has already been published by one of the authors of this paper. Also, the technique of monitoring and notifying the health of patients using an intelligent agent, to the concerned hospital personnel, has also been proposed. We now present the details of the functioning of four main intelligent agents, viz., the nurse agent, the sensor agent, the database agent and the ward boy agent, for intimating the health information to the concerned doctor in the hospital, based on certain policies relevant to the hospital. The policies, in our case have been worked out based on the temperature parameter monitored by the “nurse agent”. We have considered just as an example, the physiological parameter viz., the body temperature monitoring, for our policy based agent implementation. The implementation has been carried out using JADE-LEAP agent development kit. The details are presented in the paper.