Positive Technology Journal

Multi-agent systems are one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. In the last eight years there has been a growing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care. The first specialised workshop on this area was held at Autonomous Agents '2000 in Barcelona, Spain; several other workshops and special issues of journals have followed since then (ECAI-2002, Agentcities ID3-2003, ECAI-2004 and IJCAI-05). Moreover, a growing European community of researchers interested in the application of intelligent agents in health care emerged as a result of the activities within the AgentCities.NET European network and the AgentLink III Technical Forum Group on Healthcare Applications of Intelligent Agents. Thus, it may now be a good time for the specialists in the field to meet and report on the results achieved in this area, to discuss the benefits (and drawbacks) that agent-based systems may bring to medical domains, and also to provide a list of the research topics that should be tackled in the near future to make the deployment of health-care agent-based systems a reality.

Current topics of research include communication and co-operation between distributed intelligent agents to manage patient care, information agents that retrieve medical information from the Internet, and multi-agent systems that assist the doctors in the tasks of monitoring and diagnosis. A lot of methodological and technical problems are beginning to be discovered by the researchers that attempt to deploy agent-based systems in the medical area; just to name a few, there does not exist a universally accepted standard medical ontology, it is difficult to integrate new agent systems with legacy software, and these new agent-based systems should take into account rapidly changing national and international laws and regulations concerning the privacy of medical data and the security of the transaction of patient information between agents.

This one-day workshop will feature some of the following activities:

• Presentation of state-of-the-art papers with the latest developments in the field.
• Presentation of review-style papers.
• Demos of practical applications of MAS in health care.
• Panel discussion of the main problems that have to be faced to deploy real agent-based health-care applications.
• Time for meeting colleagues in the field and discussing possible future collaborations.