Decentralised Control of Intelligent Devices: A Healthcare Facility Study

We present a novel approach to the management of notifications from devices in a healthcare setting. We employ a distributed constraint optimisation (DCOP) approach to the delivery of notification for healthcare assistants that aims to preserve the privacy of patients while reducing the intrusiveness of such notifications. Our approach reduces the workload of the assistants and improves patient safety by automating task allocation while ensuring high priority needs are addressed in a timely manner. We propose and evaluate several DCOP models both in simulation and in real-world deployments. Our models are shown to be efficient both in terms of computation and communication costs.