Mobile Agents in Healthcare, a Distributed Intelligence Approach - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 48

the agent can freely move through different network locations while it carries out
the assigned tasks. An example of this is nomadic computing [30], where agents
reside in mobile devices and migrate to other locations to perform tasks without
consuming the scarce resources of the mobile device.
- Dynamic environment adaptation: Agents perceive environment changes and re-
act by adapting their behaviour to them. An example applied to network manage-
ment can be seen in [43], where a mobile agent is reused without modifications to
manage various networks.
- Flexible interfaces: Since its ease of adaptability, agents can be used to interact
with completely different interfaces, such as it is proposed in [50]. Even, agents
can be used as improvised adaptors between two kinds of interfaces.
- Fault tolerance: Because of the agents capacity to adapt to changing environments,
mobile agents can easily deal with computer and network faults. They are specially
suitable for hostile environments, where the agent can decide to visit alternative
locations in case of failure. An example of fault tolerance based on mobile agents
can be seen in [20].
- Parallelism: The autonomous nature of mobile agents, the ability to migrate to
different locations, and the capacity of interacting with other agents, make them
suitable for parallel applications, where a coordinated group of several agents are
used. An example, which uses them as a load balancing mechanism, can be seen
in [46].
- Local data processing: mobile agents can process data directly where it resides
without having to move it from the original location. There are two kinds of ap-
plications which benefit from this feature. Firstly, sea-of-data applications where
there is a large quantity of distributed information to process and the movement of
it has an elevated cost [16]. And, secondly, medical applications [49] where moving
data from its original location is not legal.

3MedIGS

In this section it is introduced MedIGS [49], a mobile agent based application that com-
prises several important requirements of current healthcare systems, such as distributed
information gathering and interoperation among medical centers. The main goal of the
system is the generation of Virtual Electronic Patient Records (VEPR) [6] out of all the
medical data about a patient 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.

3.1 Introduction

Healthcare is information and knowledge driven. Good healthcare depends on taking
decisions at the right time and place, according to the right patient data and applica-
ble knowledge. Communication is of utmost relevance in today's healthcare settings,
as health related activities, such as delivery of care, research and management, depend
on information sharing. Indeed, the practice of medicine has been described as being