Personalized healthcare and agent technologies

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018. Remarkable gains in life expectancy and declines in fertility have led current society to an ageing global population. Different stakeholders, researcher communities and policy makers invest serious efforts to develop intelligent and smart environments that have to support as much as possible independent living of old population. As necessary prerequisite for these efforts rapid and fascinating development in ICT offers wide range of new technologies including wearable, 3D sensors and smart environments. These new technologies provide rich complex data from living environment and give the opportunity to learn and analyze them in order to discover the patient’s preferences, traits, and states. Further research efforts are oriented to personalized healthcare and development of sophisticated e-coaching facilities to obtain proper recommendations and advices to patients in order to increase their wellbeing. Among different artificial intelligence methods and techniques agent technologies significantly influence and support different medical domains. The use of agents and multi agent systems in healthcare has also opened the ways to find out new applications like personalized and socialized healthcare platforms and systems with tailored recommendation capabilities. In this paper opportunities and challenges that agent technologies offer in personalized healthcare are discussed and presented.