Multi-Agent Systems for e-Health and the CASCOM Project

e-Health services and applications are probably one of the notable application fields where agent technology might act as a main actor in the near future. Multi-agent systems have been devised to deal with classes of problems-e.g., remote and heterogeneous software integration, remote monitoring and assistance-that are very typical for the large part of e-health services and applications. This paper describes some of the main reasons why multi-agent systems are now considered one of the best solutions for the realization and deployment of advances ehealth software. The paper motivates this claim by addressing very general issues that have been previously identified as key problems of e-health. The paper is structured in two main parts. The first introduces the technological problems that characterize e-health and it shows how multi-agent systems tackle them. The second part describes an important European scale project that has recently adopted multi-agent systems to realize an e-health application scenario, i.e., decentralized emergency assistance.