Abstract
Collaborative Work plays an important role in today’s organizations, especially in areas where decisions must be made. However, any decision that involves a collective or group of decision makers is, by itself complex, but is becoming recurrent in recent years. In this work we present the VirtualECare project, an intelligent multi-agent system able to monitor, interact and serve its customers, which are, normally, in need of care services. In last year’s there has been a substantially increase on the number of people needed of intensive care, especially among the elderly, a phenomenon that is related to population ageing. However, this is becoming not exclusive of the elderly, as diseases like obesity, diabetes and blood pressure have been increasing among young adults. This is a new reality that needs to be dealt by the health sector, particularly by the public one. Given this scenarios, the importance of finding new and cost effective ways for health care delivery are of particular importance, especially when we believe they should not to be removed from their natural “habitat”. Following this line of thinking, the VirtualECare project will be presented, like similar ones that preceded it. Recently we have also assisted to a growing interest in combining the advances in information society - computing, telecommunications and presentation – in order to create Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). Indeed, the new economy, along with increased competition in today’s complex business environments, takes the companies to seek complementarities in order to increase competitiveness and reduce risks. Under these scenarios, planning takes a major role in a company life. However, effective planning depends on the generation and analysis of ideas (innovative or not) and, as a result, the idea generation and management processes are crucial. Our objective is to apply the above presented GDSS to a new area. We believe that the use of GDSS in the healthcare arena will allow professionals to achieve better results in the analysis of one’s Electronically Clinical Profile (ECP). This achievement is vital, regarding the explosion of knowledge and skills, together with the need to use limited resources and get better results.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Ford, E.S., Capewell, S.: JACC:2128-2132 (2007)
WHO, Active ageing: towards age-friendly primary health care. World Health Organization (2004)
Giráldez, M., Casal, C.: The Role of Ambient Intelligent in the Social Integration of the Elderly. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2005)
Camarinha-Matos, L.M., Afsarmanesh, H.: Virtual Communities and Elderly Support. WSES (2001)
Saranummi, N., Kivisaari, S., Sarkikoski, T., Graafmans, J.: Ageing & Technology - State of the art. Report for the European Commission, Institute for Prospective Studies, Seville, Spain (1996)
Costa, R., Novais, P., Machado, J., Alberto, C., Neves, J.: Inter-organization Cooperation for Care of the Elderly. Springer, Wuhan (2007)
Costa, R., Neves, J., Novais, P., Machado, J., Lima, L., Alberto, C.: Intelligent Mixed Reality for the Creation of Ambient Assisted Living. LNCS(LNAI). Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Sarela, A., Korhonen, I., Lotjonen, J., Sola, M., Myllymaki, M.: IST Vivago ® - an intelligent social and remote wellness monitoring system for the elderly. In: 4th International IEEE EMBS Special Topic Conference on Information Technology Applications in Biomedicine, Birmingham, UK, pp. 362–365 (2003)
Augusto, J.C., McCullah, P., McClelland, V., Walden, J.-A.: Enhanced Healthcare Provision Through Assisted Decision-Making in a Smart Home Environment. In: 2nd Workshop on Artificial Inteligence Techniques for Ambient Inteligence (2007)
Camarinha-Matos, L.M.: Virtual Enterprises and Collaborative Networks (IFIP International Federation for Information Processing). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2004)
Camarinha-Matos, L.: New collaborative organizations and their research needs. In: PRO-VE 2003. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2003)
Marreiros, G., Santos, R., Ramos, C., Neves, J., Novais, P., Machado, J., Bulas-Cruz, J.: Ambient Intelligence in Emotion Based Ubiquitous Decision Making. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2007) - 2nd Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Ambient Intelligence, AITAmI 2007 (2007)
Bostrom, R., Anson, R., Clawson, V. (eds.): Group facilitation and group support systems. Macmillan, NYC (2003)
Schwarz, R.M.: The Skilled Facilitator: Practical Wisdom for Developing Effective Groups. Jossey Bass, San Francisco (1994)
Dubs, S., Hayne, S.C.: Distributed facilitation: a concept whose time has come? Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 314–321 (1992)
Rittel, H., Webber, M.: Policy Sciences 4, 155–169 (1973)
Brito, L., Novais, P., Neves, J.: The logic behind negotiation: from pre-argument reasoning to argument-based negotiaion. In: Plekhanova, V. (ed.) Intelligent Agent Software Engineering, pp. 137–159. Idea Group Piblishing, USA (2003)
Conklin, J.: The IBIS Manual: A short course in IBIS methodology. GDSS Inc
Conklin, J., Begeman, M.: gIBIS: A Hypertext tool for exploratory policy discussion (1988)
Hustadt, U.: Do we need the closed-world assumption in knowledge representation? In: Buchheit, N. (ed.) KI 1994 Workshop Baader, Saarbrüken, Germany (1994)
Analide, C.: Antropopatia em Entidades Virtuais, Ph.D. Thesis. Engineering School University of Minho, Braga, Portugal (2004)
Neves, J.: A Logic Interpreter to Handle Time and Negation in Logic Data Bases. In: Proceedings of the ACM 1984, The Fifth Generation Challenge, pp. 50–54 (1984)
Gelfond, M., Lifschitz, V.: Logic Programs with Classical Negation. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Logic Programming (1990)
Parsons, S.: IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Eng. 8 (1996)
Holmlid, S., Björklind, A.: Ambient Intelligence to Go. In: AmIGo White Paper on mobile intelligent ambience (2003)
Initiative OSG Osgi Service Platform, Release 3. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2003)
Chen, K., Gong, L.: Programming Open Service Gateways with Java Embedded Server(TM) Technology. Prentice Hall PTR, Englewood Cliffs (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Costa, R., Novais, P., Lima, L., Cruz, J.B., Neves, J. (2009). VirtualECare: Group Support in Collaborative Networks Organizations for Digital Homecare. In: Yogesan, K., Bos, L., Brett, P., Gibbons, M.C. (eds) Handbook of Digital Homecare. Series in Biomedical Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01387-4_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01387-4_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-01386-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-01387-4
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)