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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Towards a Simulator of Integrated Long-Term Care Systems for Elderly People

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In this paper, we propose a simulator for integrated long-term care systems using as a starting point a holistic model of care systems for people that need long term care, the Sustainable Socio-Health Model (SSHM). The implementation of the simulator on the Jason multi-agent platform allows the tool to include the human interactions, preferences, and social abilities that take place between elderly people and the staff of healthcare systems (doctors, social workers and nurses). In addition, the use of this multi-agent platform provides the required scalability for simulating population sizes of different orders of magnitude. The paper shows the model to be implemented in the simulator, the simulator architecture, the types of agents considered, their functionality and the information flow among them. Additionally, it shows the validation of the simulator with real data obtained from empirical studies conducted by the Polibienestar Research Institute in Spain, as well as a performance evaluation that sketches the performance of the simulator when using the centralized Jason infrastructure under different population sizes. Effectively, simulation can provide policy makers with the option of going into a decision theatre and virtually knowing the consequences of different policies prior to determining the real policy to be adopted.