Intelligent multimedia communication for enhanced medical e-collaboration in back pain treatment

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 SAGE PublicationsRemote, multimedia-based, collaboration in back pain treatment is an option which only recently has come to the attention of clinicians and IT providers. The take-up of such applications will inevitably depend on their ability to produce an acceptable level of service over congested and unreliable public networks. However, although the problem of multimedia application-level performance is closely linked to both the user perspective of the experience as well as to the service provided by the underlying network, it is rarely studied from an integrated viewpoint. To alleviate this problem, we propose an intelligent mechanism that integrates user-related requirements with the more technical characterization of quality of service, obtaining a priority order of low-level quality of service parameters, which would ensure that user-centred quality of perception is maintained at an optimum level. We show how our framework is capable of suggesting appropriately tailored transmission protocols, by incorporating user requirements in the remote delivery of e-health solutions

Electronic Report Generation Web Service evaluated within a Telemedicine System

This work presents a generic tool based on a client-server architecture that generates electronic reports helping the evaluation process of any information system. For the specific evaluation of telemedicine systems the defined reports cover four dimensions: auditory of the system; evolution of clinical protocols; results from the questionnaires for user acceptance and quality of life; and surveillance of clinical variables. The use of a Web Service approach allows multiplatform use of the developed electronic report service and the modularity followed in the implementation enables easy system evolution and scalability

Designing community care systems with AUML

This paper describes an approach to developing an appropriate agent environment appropriate for use in community care applications. Key to its success is that software designers collaborate with environment builders to provide the levels of cooperation and support required within an integrated agent–oriented community system. Agent-oriented Unified Modeling Language (AUML) is a practical approach to the analysis, design, implementation and management of such an agent-based system, whilst providing the power and expressiveness necessary to support the specification, design and organization of a health care service. The background of an agent-based community care application to support the elderly is described. Our approach to building agent–oriented software development solutions emphasizes the importance of AUML as a fundamental initial step in producing more general agent–based architectures. This approach aims to present an effective methodology for an agent software development process using a service oriented approach, by addressing the agent decomposition, abstraction, and organization characteristics, whilst reducing its complexity by exploiting AUML’s productivity potential. </p

Managing healthcare workflows in a multi-agent system environment

Whilst Multi-Agent System (MAS) architectures appear to offer a more flexible model for designers and developers of complex, collaborative information systems, implementing real-world business processes that can be delegated to autonomous agents is still a relatively difficult task. Although a range of agent tools and toolkits exist, there still remains the need to move the creation of models nearer to code generation, in order that the development path be more rigorous and repeatable. In particular, it is essential that complex organisational process workflows are captured and expressed in a way that MAS can successfully interpret. Using a complex social care system as an exemplar, we describe a technique whereby a business process is captured, expressed, verified and specified in a suitable format for a healthcare MAS.</p

An agent-based architecture for managing the provision of community care - the INCA (Intelligent Community Alarm) experience

Community Care is an area that requires extensive cooperation between independent agencies, each of which needs to meet its own objectives and targets. None are engaged solely in the delivery of community care, and need to integrate the service with their other responsibilities in a coherent and efficient manner. Agent technology provides the means by which effective cooperation can take place without compromising the essential security of both the client and the agencies involved as the appropriate set of responses can be generated through negotiation between the parties without the need for access to the main information repositories that would be necessary with conventional collaboration models. The autonomous nature of agents also means that a variety of agents can cooperate together with various local capabilities, so long as they conform to the relevant messaging requirements. This allows a variety of agents, with capabilities tailored to the carers to which they are attached to be developed so that cost-effective solutions can be provided. </p

Adding X-security to Carrel: security for agent-based healthcare applications

The high growth of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in Open Networks with initiatives such as Agentcities1 requires development in many different areas such as scalable and secure agent platforms, location services, directory services, and systems management. In our case we have focused our effort on security for agent systems. The driving force of this paper is provide a practical vision of how security mechanisms could be introduced for multi-agent applications. Our case study for this experiment is Carrel [9]: an Agent-based application in the Organ and Tissue transplant domain. The selection of this application is due to its characteristics as a real scenario and use of high-risk data for example, a study of the 21 most visited health-related web sites on the Internet discovered that personal information provided at many of the sites was being inadvertently leaked for unauthorized persons. These factors indicate to us that Carrel would be a suitable environment in order to test existing security safeguards. Furthermore, we believe that the experience gathered will be useful for other MAS. In order to achieve our purpose we describe the design, architecture and implementation of security elements on MAS for the Carrel System.Postprint (published version