Agent-Based Plug-and-Play Integration of Role-Enabled Medical Devices

Information technology is proposing as an important support for managing health care. In particular, software agents represent a useful paradigm to meet the different requirements of e-health applications. In this paper we focus on the issues related to the integration of heterogeneous medical devices, to perform flexible vital sign monitoring by means of easy plug-and-play device connection. We propose an approach that integrates the agent-based UbiMedic framework, which provides facilities for e- health applications, and the RoleSystem infrastructure, which allows the management of interactions by means of agent roles. A prototype has been implemented and an example is exploited to show the advantages of the proposed approach, notably its interoperability.