Normative Agents in Health Care: Uses and challenges

Issue title: Agents Applied in Health Care

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Vázquez-Salceda, Javier

Affiliations: Institute of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands E-mail: javier@cs.uu.nl

Abstract: The use of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in health-care domains is increasing. Such Agent-mediated Medical Systems are designed to manage complex tasks and can adapt gracefully to unexpected events. However, in those systems the issues of privacy and security (in the access to patient records), safety and soundness (of the individual agent behaviours and the multiagent system as a whole) and trust (among heterogeneous agents and among users and agents) are particularly sensitive. Also, health care systems are highly regulated by regional, national and European regulations and policies. Therefore several normative contexts (European, national, regional) should be taken into account while designing agent-mediated health care systems. This paper presents the less explored normative problem of the application of agents in Health Care. The impact on both individual agents and agent platforms is discussed. On the individual agent side, Normative Agents (agents whose behaviour is guided by collections of norms) are presented. On the agent platforms side, the concept of Electronic Institutions (as normative environments to increase trust and ensure proper agent behaviour) is presented, along with some methodological considerations, the impact on implementation and some of the technologies needed to be developed in the future.

Keywords: Norms, Normative Agents, Electronic Institutions, agents in health care

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 175-189, 2005