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such as allergies or infectious diseases, from the patient record while the victim is still
in transit.
In this case, mobile agents are used to bring critical information forward to the emer-
gency area, thus improving the treatment received by the victim.
Finally, a support system based on the use of mobile agents for the transmission of
electronic triage tag information has also been presented. The most important feature
of this application is that no end-to-end communication is needed at all, and therefore
it can operate without any infrastructure.
All three cases showed common problems in large eHealth systems, and illustrated
at the same time how mobile agents can be used to face them. One of the most impor-
tant conclusions drawn is that agents have been crucial to face the high complexity of
these systems. Should traditional technologies had been used to solve these problems,
a greater effort in designing would have been required. Besides, the current scalability
in all the systems would have been very difficult to achieve, if not impossible.
Basic interoperability problems where solved partially by using the standards defined
by IEEE-FIPA (
http://www.fipa.org
). In particular, the Agent Communication Language
(ACL) was of great help for designing interactions.
Mobile agents are being used more and more commonly in complex distributed ap-
plications, such as complex eHealth systems. However, there is still a long way to run
to make the most of mobile agents in this domain. Currently, there are some promising
lines of research going on. Integrating different applications to find out interoperability
problems is one of them. Also, applying Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to mobile
agents in this scenario is being explored. Although the RBAC policies provide for a
good access control management, some situations might need additional mechanisms
for a more flexible adaptation to sudden changes in the organization or emergency situ-
ations. Discretionary delegation of permissions could be of special interest.
The information systems described in this chapter could also be used in different do-
mains other than eHealth, such as public administration or universities. In these scenar-
ios, there exist heterogeneous distributed information sources that could benefit from
the results of this work, showing another advantage of using the paradigm of mobile
agents: re-usability.
References
1. Ametller, J., Robles, S., Ortega-Ruiz, J.A.: Self-protected mobile agents. In: 3rd International
Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agents Systems, July 2004, vol. 1, pp. 362-
367. ACM Press, New York (2004)
2. Barnett, O.: Computers in medicine. In: JAMA, vol. 263, pp. 2631-2633 (1990)
3. Bellifemine, F.L., Caire, G., Greenwood, D.: Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE,
January 2006. Wiley, Chichester (2006)
4. Carver, L., Turoff, M.: Human-computer interaction: the human and computer as a team in
emergency management information systems. Commun. ACM 50(3), 33-38 (2007)
5. Chen, R., Sharman, R., Rao, H.R., Upadhyaya, S.J.: Design principles of coordinated multi-
incident emergency response systems. In: Kantor, P., Muresan, G., Roberts, F., Zeng, D.D.,
Wang, F.-Y., Chen, H., Merkle, R.C. (eds.) ISI 2005. LNCS, vol. 3495, pp. 81-98. Springer,
Heidelberg (2005) Times Cited: 0
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