A mobile agent approach for secure integrated medical information systems

An Efficient Agent Based Data Management Method of NoSQL Environments for Health Care Applications

BACKGROUND

As medical knowledge is continuously expanding and diversely located, Health Information Technology (HIT) applications are proposed as a good prospect for improving not only the efficiency and the effectiveness but also the quality of healthcare services delivery. The technologies expected to shape such innovative HIT architectures include: Mobile agents (Mas) and NoSQL technologies. Mobile agents provide an inherent way of tackling distributed problems of accessing heterogeneous and spatially diverse data sources. NoSQL technology gains ground for the development of scalable applications with non-static and open data schema from complex and diverse sources.

METHODS AND DESIGN

This paper conducts a twofold study: It attempts a literature review of the applications based on the mobile agent (MA) and NoSQL technologies for healthcare support services. Subsequently, a pilot system evaluates the NoSQL technology against the relational one within a distributed environment based on mobile agents for information retrieval. Its objective is to study the feasibility of developing systems that will employ ontological data representation and task implementation through mobile agents towards flexible and transparent health data monitoring.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The articles studied focus on applying mobile agents for patient support and healthcare services provision thus as to make a positive contribution to the treatment of chronic diseases. In addition, attention is put on the design of platform neutral techniques for clinical data gathering and dissemination over NoSQL. The experimental environment was based on the Apache Jena Fuseki NoSQL server and the JAVA Agent DEvelopment Framework -JADE agent platform. The results reveal that the NoSQL implementation outperforms the standard relational one.

vhMentor: An Ontology Supported Mobile Agent System for Pervasive Health Care Monitoring

Healthcare provision is a set of activities that demands the collaboration of several stakeholders (e.g. physicians, nurses, managers, patients etc.) who hold distinct expertise and responsibilities. In addition, medical knowledge is diversely located and often shared under no central coordination and supervision authority, while medical data flows remain mostly passive regarding the way data is delivered to both clinicians and patients. In this paper, we propose the implementation of a virtual health Mentor (vhMentor) which stands as a dedicated ontology schema and FIPA compliant agent system. Agent technology proves to be ideal for developing healthcare applications due to its distributed operation over systems and data sources of high heterogeneity. Agents are able to perform their tasks by acting pro-actively in order to assist individuals to overcome limitations posed during accessing medical data and executing non-automatic error-prone processes. vhMentor further comprises the Jess rules engine in order to implement reasoning logic. Thus, on the one hand vhMentor is a prototype that fills the gap between healthcare systems and the care provision community, while on the other hand allows the blending of next generation distributed services in healthcare domain.

A Systematic Literature Review of Agents Applied in Healthcare

Intelligent agents and healthcare have been intimately linked in the last years. The intrinsic complexity and diversity of care can be tackled with the flexibility, dynamics and reliability of multi-agent systems. The purpose of this review is to show the feasibility of applying intelligent agents in the healthcare domain and use the findings to provide a discussion of current trends and devise future research directions. A review of the most recent literature (2009-2014) of applications of agents in healthcare is discussed, and two classifications considering the main goal of the health systems as well as the main actors involved have been investigated. This review shows that the number of published works exhibits a growing interest of researchers in this field in a wide range of applications.

CardioSmart365: Artificial Intelligence in the Service of Cardiologic Patients

Artificial intelligence has significantly contributed in the evolution of medical informatics and biomedicine, providing a variety of tools available to be exploited, from rule-based expert systems and fuzzy logic to neural networks and genetic algorithms. Moreover, familiarizing people with smartphones and the constantly growing use of medical-related mobile applications enables complete and systematic monitoring of a series of chronic diseases both by health professionals and patients. In this work, we propose an integrated system for monitoring and early notification for patients suffering from heart diseases. CardioSmart365 consists of web applications, smartphone native applications, decision support systems, and web services that allow interaction and communication among end users: cardiologists, patients, and general doctors. The key features of the proposed solution are (a) recording and management of patients' measurements of vital signs performed at home on regular basis (blood pressure, blood glucose, oxygen saturation, weight, and height), (b) management of patients' EMRs, (c) cardiologic patient modules for the most common heart diseases, (d) decision support systems based on fuzzy logic, (e) integrated message management module for optimal communication between end users and instant notifications, and (f) interconnection to Microsoft HealthVault platform. CardioSmart365 contributes to the effort for optimal patient monitoring at home and early response in cases of emergency.

Secure communication of medical information using mobile agents

Recently several efficient schemes are proposed to provide security of e-medicine systems. Almost all of these schemes have tried to achieve the highest security level in transmission of patients' medical information to medical institutions through a heterogeneous network like Internet. In this paper, we explain the insecurity of these schemes against "man-in-the-middle" attack. Furthermore, a dynamic mobile agent system based on hybrid cryptosystem is proposed that is both secure and also efficient in computation cost. Analyzing the security criteria confirms suitability of the proposed scheme for e-medicine systems.