Due to the increasing number of Dementia patients, the overall costs for caregiving has grown by 32i¾?% between 2002 and 2008. The efficient use of smart decision support systems for managing ambulant care and mobile nursing services that provide professional care for Dementia patients is an important challenge to reduce cost and increase service quality. The optimal allocation of caregiving resources from different mobile nursing service firms to a growing number of Dementia patients, however, is a difficult problem in the healthcare domain. We approach this problem from a multiagent systems perspective by designing and implementing a distributed decision support system that utilizes an auction-based protocol for allocating caregiving resources subject to Dementia-specific service attributes. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed protocol by an early stage prototype implementation presenting the system's proof-of-concept.
['Tobias Widmer', 'Marc Premm']
Agent-Based Decision Support for Allocating Caregiving Resources in a Dementia Scenario