Fuzzy multi-agent assistance system for elderly care based on user engagement

Abstract

An intelligent system intended to provide assistance to an elderly user in their home is presented. This multi-agent system is designed to monitor the interaction between the user and other agents, and regulate itself based on the estimated level of mental engagement of the user in order to contribute to help them maintain adequate levels of awareness and interaction with their home environment. The agents are devices programmed to preserve the security, comfort and health of the user, who is also conceptualized as one of the agents in the system. The user engagement level is estimated through fuzzy inference, that is, by means of a set of fuzzy membership functions and rules applied over the interaction of the user with different categories of agents. The system incorporates several dozen agents and is tested using two different datasets of real interactions between users and devices in their home environments. A uniform parameter configuration yielded very positive results for diverse scenarios and subsequently the parameters of the system were automatically optimized to show that improved performance, in the form of a more efficient system regulation and increased certainty in adjustment estimation, is obtained.