Mobile Agents in Healthcare, a Distributed Intelligence Approach - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 44

Chapter 4
Mobile Agents in Healthcare, a Distributed Intelligence
Approach

Abraham Martın-Campillo, Carles Martınez-Garcıa, Jordi Cucurull, Ramon Martı,
Sergi Robles, and Joan Borrell

Departament of Information and Communications Engineering, Universitat Aut onoma de
Barcelona, 08193 Cerdanyola del Valles, Spain
{ abraham.martin,carlos.martinez,jordi.cucurull } @uab.cat ,
{ ramon.marti.escale,sergi.robles,joan.borrell } @uab.cat

1 Introduction

1.1 Introduction

The information in healthcare institutions is generally managed by computer appli-
cations deployed in medical centers. Usually, each organization has its own system,
which is normally proprietary and makes it difficult the exchange of information with
other institutions. This chapter discusses the use of mobile agent technology [51,7] as
an enabler of open distributed eHealth applications. More precisely, it describes some
successful experiences based on this technology: one regarding integration of medi-
cal information, and two concerning emergency scenarios. These three successful cases
can be very useful at the time of designing new eHealth systems since they have already
solved many of the most common issues in this domain.
The first system that will be presented is MedIGS [49], a mobile agent based applica-
tion that comprises several important features of current healthcare systems, such as dis-
tributed information gathering and interoperation among medical centers. The main goal
of the system is achieving a Virtual Electronic Patient Medical Record (VEPMR) [6]
out of all the medical data about a patient which are spread over a set of hospitals.
The system benefits from the mobile agent technology, which relies on local searches
performed by roaming agents avoiding the need of a central repository.
Secondly, an application will be described for retrieving partial information of med-
ical records upon request from an emergency scene [33]. This solution fits well when
mobile ad hoc networks are in use, and it is based on the asynchronous communication
provided by mobile agents. This system allows, for example, to request remote hospi-
tals for critical information about the victims, such as allergies or infectious diseases,
thus facilitating more accurate diagnosis and bringing forward decision making.
Finally, the chapter will analyse the case of the Mobile Agent Electronic Triage Tag
system (MAETT) [31][32], which is based on mobile electronic triage tags for emer-
gency situations that makes victim information available at the base of operations as
soon as possible, thus allowing an early medical resource allocation and immediate
action. The cornerstone of the system is mobile agent technology, which allows infor-
mation to be transported asynchronously and reliably from terminal to terminal and not