An agent based system for the contextual retrieval of medical information

Abstract

As in any other organization, hospital personnel absorb information from their environment, turn it into knowledge, and then make decisions based on it. Hospital Information Systems that provide access to electronic patient records and the proliferation of Medical Digital Libraries on the Web, are a step in the direction of providing accurate and timely information to hospital staff in support of adequate decision-making. A recent trend in the development of these systems is the support for ubiquitous computing technology that can be used by the hospital staff to access medical information anywhere and anytime. Physicians often use information from previous clinical cases in their decision-making. However, they seldom consult the records of previous patients, to a large extent because they are difficult to locate. In this paper, we present a ubiquitous computing medical system, which main components are context-aware agents that autonomously achieve information management tasks on behalf of the user, such as retrieving and recommending links to previous patient’s records and to information of medical digital libraries which are accessible through the Web.