The patient advocate: a cooperative agent to support patient-centered needs and demands.

Knowledge-based monitoring and therapy planning systems were mainly built for the convenience of health care providers. They neglected the consumers of health care, namely, the patients. Our approach is concentrated on the individual patients' demands and needs. We are designing, building, and demonstrating a cooperative agent to support patients' management of their own health-related behavior on a day-to-day basis at home. Clinical treatment protocols are represented in an intention-based time-oriented representation language to overcome the drawbacks of vague or ill-structured problem definitions (e.g., missing functional dependencies). These representations are used to guide the patients, to provide necessary explanations, and to observe and critique whether the patients obey the instructions of the health-care providers. We will present a prototype which supports women with gestational diabetes mellitus.