Multi-Agent Systems for E-Health and Telemedicine

Health care is characterized by high degree of distributed, labor-intensive works, mobility, and information access to large set of dynamic and unstructured information, distributed over a large number of information systems. The advent of Internet and the evolution of information technologies promote the development of Internet based applications that try to make effective the remote interaction between health-care providers and their patients and among health-care providers and to automatize the acquisition, exchange and manipulating of information distributed in a large number of (heterogeneous) information systems. Multi-agent systems represent the most promising information technology for coping with a class of problems (i.e., remote and heterogeneous software applications integration, distributed tasks execution coordination, and remote monitoring and assistance) which are typical problems of the large part of Internet based health care applications (see, e.g., Jennings et al., 1995; Muller, 1998; Bordini et al., 2005). In particular, applications for healthcare can take outstanding advantage of the intrinsic characteristics of multi-agent systems because usually they are composed of loosely coupled (complex) systems, are realized in terms of heterogeneous components and legacy systems, manage distributed data and resources; and are accessed by remote users in (synchronous) collaboration (Moreno & Nealon, 2003; Annicchiarico et al., 2008). The goal of this chapter is to describe the main reasons why multi-agent systems are considered one of the most interesting technologies for the development of applications for health care. It provides some guidelines intended to help identifying the kinds of applications that can truly take advantage of the features of multi-agent systems, and it presents some of the most important international projects that used multi-agent systems in the healthcare and social services domain.