Ontology-based multi-agents for intelligent healthcare applications

A healthy diet and lifestyle are the most effective approaches to prevent disease. Good eating habits are central to a healthy lifestyle. When a person eats too much or too little on a continual basis, the risk of disease will increase. Therefore, developing healthy and balanced eating habits is essential to disease prevention. This paper proposes an ontology-based multi-agents (OMAS), including a personal knowledge agent, a fuzzy inference agent, and a semantic generation agent, for evaluating the health of diets. Using the proposed approach, domain experts can create nutritional facts for common Taiwanese foods. Next, the users are requested to input foods eaten. Finally, the food ontology and personal profile ontology are constructed by domain experts. Fuzzy markup language (FML) is used to describe the knowledge base and rule base of the OMAS. Additionally, web ontology language (OWL) is employed to describe the food ontology and personal profile ontology. Finally, the OMAS semantically analyzes dietary status for users based on the pre-constructed ontology and fuzzy inference results. Using the generated semantic analysis, people can obtain health information about what they eat, which can lead to a healthy lifestyle and healthy diet. Experimental results show that the proposed approach works effectively and diet health status can be provided as a reference to promote healthy living. © Springer-Verlag 2010.