Supporting Health and Community Care with Multi-Agent Systems

Mainly as a consequence of societal changes, the traditional approach to provide cares and social services in hospitals and institutional centres is being paralleled with a growing tendency to provide cares in the community, directly. Information and communication technologies play an important role in enabling and supporting this tendency. However, the most relevant requirements for this application area require a choice of adequate technologies. In particular, multi-agent systems are being proposed as a suitable technology for this application area, since they are based on loosely coupled and heterogeneous components, allow the dynamic and distributed management of data, and support the remote collaboration among users. In fact, multi-agent systems are being effectively used in a number of International projects related to health and community care, which demonstrate the advantages, together with the open challenges characterizing this approach.