Mobile Agents in Healthcare, a Distributed Intelligence Approach - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 58

of different teams and coordinators of different areas of the emergency (police, social
welfare, etc.).
The actions may involve the use of non-personal but material resources. The manage-
ment of these resources is something that must be taken into account in an emergency as
these resources are finite. The number of blood units that are available for victims who
needs urgent transfusions, ambulances available to transport the victims to the hospital,
the number of beds and operating rooms available at nearby hospitals, etc. are some
examples of resources that will necessary have to administer and know its quantity.
The authors of paper [10] aim to integrate the decision-making systems of all the
equipment involved in the emergency. The information is automatically shared through
the whole devices of the emergency scene and the decisions are based on the scope of
thewholeemergency.
4.2.4 User Interface
Some systems use specific interfaces on the PDA of the triage staff as a support for
the management of information and triage assistance [19,44,36]. At first it seems like a
good idea, but a difficult to read or non-intuitive an interface can lead to the opposite.
During an emergency everything is urgent and the staff responsible for the care of the
victims cannot spend their time using a tiny keyboard on the PDA or a virtual keyboard
on the touchscreen. PDA-personnel interaction should be easy, intuitive, and above all
fast. The user of the PDA must comprehend, without reading a long text, what he is
doing, what happened, and what the next step is. Therefore it is good to use pictures
and intuitive interfaces for data input.
Paper [4] discusses the human-computer interaction related to the systems dedicated
to emergency management and how this can influence the response. As a conclusion
they define that a human being must be taken into account as part of the system and
the hardware as part of the team. Thus, defining a communication between both is an
easier task.
4.2.5 Interoperability
Response to an emergency involves different teams: rescue, firefighters, first aid, police.
They have to share information and coordinate joint actions to perform. Normally, the
action and communication protocols used by them are quite different. Therefore, define
standard methods for communication between different emergency teams is of utmost
importance if one wants an effective exchange of information and a good coordina-
tion [37].
The teams consist of an ad hoc basis by members of different teams with different
roles and different priorities. These roles are well defined when these members are
within their team. But in emergency situations, in which one must respond quickly
and there are involved heterogeneous groups, roles are not predefined and must use
improvisation. To deal with improvisation, decision support systems are used.
4.2.6 Agents
Agents can be a good resource to use for emergency management [9], since respond-
ing to an emergency requires many complex tasks performed by multiple actors under
conditions of time and resource requirements.