Modeling a caregiver-escalation decision as a POMDP — sanity check from an RL beginner
Hi everyone — I'm a complete beginner working on a small project: an agent that decides whether to remind, wait, or notify a caregiver when someone hasn't responded to a medication reminder. The true state (fine but busy, asleep, phone dead, actual emergency) is hidden, and I only get noisy signals like elapsed time and response history.
I've been framing this as a POMDP — belief state over hidden states, updated via Bayesian filtering, with an escalation policy mapping belief → action.
Given the asymmetric costs (missing a real emergency vs. a false alarm), does POMDP even make sense here, or is this overkill for what could be solved with a simpler heuristic/threshold approach? Would appreciate any pointers or papers on similar "when to escalate" problems under uncertainty.