Developing Smart Emergency Applications with Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Multi-agent systems have been importantly contributing to the development of the theory and the practice of complex distributed systems and, in particular, they have shown their potential to meet critical needs in high-speed, mission-critical, content-rich, distributed information applications where mutual interdependencies, dynamic environments, uncertainty, and sophisticated control play a remarkable role. Therefore, multi-agent systems are considered a suitable technology for the realization of e-health applications where the use of loosely coupled and heterogeneous components, the dynamic and distributed management of data, and the remote collaboration among users are often the most relevant requirements. This paper describes some of the main reasons why multi-agent systems are today considered one of the best technologies for the realization and deployment of advances for e-health applications and, in particular, of smart emergency applications. After an introduction on the inherent characteristics of the use of multi-agent systems for e-health, the paper presents the results of EU-scale project CASCOM: a real multi-agent system for the execution of smart emergency tasks.

Quality Assessment of Virtual Human Assistants for Elder Users

“…As a result, the feasibility of employing embodied conversational agents (ECAs) in the context of eHealth and mHealth use case scenarios has gained considerable research attention in the past few years. mHealth ad-dresses mobile health-related scenarios where devices are used to collect, transmit, and process vital patients' data, such as heart rate and blood pressure, in real time [18]. Some recent examples of mobile applications for monitoring health issues that employ VAs are presented here.…”

Applications of Intelligent Agents in Health Sector-A Review

“…In one another research usage of multi-agent systems for the realization and deployment of advances for e-health applications and, in particular, of smart emergency applications been developed. (Bergenti and Poggi 2010).…”

Developing a multi-agent platform supporting patient hospital stays following a socio-technical approach: Management and governance benefits

“…Currently used software systems in hospitals are often too old and closed to ensure software collaboration/integration (Bergenti and Poggi, 2010). Acting as IT consultants and researchers, the authors have studied the processes and IT infrastructure of a Belgian hospital.…”

“…At the start of the research, the information systems of this hospital were obsolete and not coupled nor integrated. These systems were connected with a central database coming from the reorganization of multiple other (previous) datastores having different purposes and linked together in a "do it yourself" way, a common problem in healthcare institutions notably highlighted by Bergenti and Poggi (2010). It was thus poorly conceived and not fully normalized so that history and consistency were not ensured.…”