Monitoring intelligent system for the Intensive Care Unit using RFID and multi-agent systems

In an environment where patients' lives are at stake, Intensive Care Units (ICUs) become a good scenario for the implementation of Ambient Intelligence, helping medical professionals in their task of retrieving the well-being to patients. INTCare project is a system that aims the real-time monitoring of patients, and predicts their outcome in a short period of time. When patients' vital signs get out of range, an alert system warns medical staff about the patient condition. PaLMS, a Patient Localization and Monitoring System, is being developed and tested in Centro Hospitalar do Porto — CHP, a hospital in Portugal. It uses RFID technology with a multi-agent architecture for communications inside hospital, thus providing a way to improve INTCare by ending the storage and analysis of redundant data, collected when the patient isn't in the bed, plus stopping the warning events triggered by the vital signs out of range.