A Role-Based Agent-Oriented Approach to Medical Device Integration

Monitoring heterogeneous medical devices is a key issue for efficient medical information management in high-quality health care delivery. Collecting vital signs and integrating data from various sources is very important in order to make precise diagnosis and provide effective emergency response. Current commercial rules and the scarce adoption of standard protocols are the first main obstacle to achieve a real integration. We propose a work-in-progress, role-based, agent-oriented solution to overcome this obstacle: proper mobile agents are in charge of acquiring data from each kind of medical device (e.g., electrocardiograms, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation gauges), providing a uniform interface toward the business logic; in its turn, each medical device is provided by a vendor-specific role, embodying the capability to interface with the device by means of its own protocol. Thus, each time a new medical device requires the integration in a wider system, a generic mobile agent migrates to the device node; here, it assumes the role of the specific device manufacturer and starts delivering the acquired data hiding the heterogeneity of the device. We will propose such a solution describing the implementation of a demonstrative prototype exploiting the RoleSystem infrastructure, which dynamically makes role capabilities available to the agents.