title: A distributed multiagent system architecture for body area networks applied to healthcare monitoring.
abstract: In the last years the area of health monitoring has grown significantly, attracting the attention of both academia and commercial sectors. At the same time, the availability of new biomedical sensors and suitable network protocols has led to the appearance of a new generation of wireless sensor networks, the so-called wireless body area networks. Nowadays, these networks are routinely used for continuous monitoring of vital parameters, movement, and the surrounding environment of people, but the large volume of data generated in different locations represents a major obstacle for the appropriate design, development, and deployment of more elaborated intelligent systems. In this context, we present an open and distributed architecture based on a multiagent system for recognizing human movements, identifying human postures, and detecting harmful activities. The proposed system evolved from a single node for fall detection to a multisensor hardware solution capable of identifying unhampered falls and analyzing the users' movement. The experiments carried out contemplate two different scenarios and demonstrate the accuracy of our proposal as a real distributed movement monitoring and accident detection system. Moreover, we also characterize its performance, enabling future analyses and comparisons with similar approaches.
authors: Fundação Para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), Foundation for Science and Technology, 1249-074 Lisbon, Portugal ; Higher Technical School of Computer Engineering, University of Vigo, Polytechnic Building, Campus Universitario As Lagoas s/n, 32004 Ourense, Spain.
authors: Filipe
authors: 0000-0003-1209-8888
authors: F
authors: Felisberto
authors: Higher Technical School of Computer Engineering, University of Vigo, Polytechnic Building, Campus Universitario As Lagoas s/n, 32004 Ourense, Spain.
authors: Rosalía
authors: R
authors: Laza
authors: Higher Technical School of Computer Engineering, University of Vigo, Polytechnic Building, Campus Universitario As Lagoas s/n, 32004 Ourense, Spain.
authors: Florentino
authors: 0000-0002-3943-8013
authors: F
authors: Fdez-Riverola
authors: INOV INESC INNOVATION, Institute of New Technologies of Leiria, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal ; Computer Science and Communications Research Centre, School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal.
authors: António
authors: A
authors: Pereira
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008991:Monitoring, Physiologic / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D059015:Wireless Technology / Q000295:instrumentation*