James Taylor's Decision Management

Boomers Who Can Afford Home Monitoring Systems May Remain at Home Longer — In the future, sensor technology could provide limitless opportunities for preserving the independent lifestyles of the Baby Boomer generation while preventing illness and injury. Wearable sensor networks embedded in clothing, for example, could monitor a person's gait for irregularity, and address the abnormality prior to a potentially painful fall. Some clothing sensors could also notify a caregiver if the wearer falls or experiences another medical problem, prompting an automatic call for help.

While there is clearly a need for new sensor and monitoring technologies in this scenario,it also shows the need for decision automation. All these sensors will have limited intelligence embedded. The ability to tell the difference between a change in routine and a crisis might well involve interpreting signals from multiple sensors. Different doctors will want to monitor different patients in different ways to reflect the unique circumstances of each. Inferring the right moment to tell a medical provider about a specific patient requires a complex decision that will need to be automated. The combination of business rules (so that patients, medical equipment providers and doctors can all participate in setting the rules) and powerful analytics that predict approaching problems from data being gathered is ideal for this kind of automation. Indeed there is at least one example of monitoring heart patients on my other blog and clearly things like diabetes are getting close to this approach already.

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