Advanced telemedicine system using 3G cellular networks and agent technology

Abstract

The world’s ageing population and prevalence of chronic diseases have lead to high demand for healthcare services. Telemedicine systems based on modern information and communication technology are expected to play a pivotal role in alleviating the pressure on health care services. Fortunately there have been a rapid advanced in technologies including wireless communication especially the third generation network (3G), Internet, software agent and health care devices in terms of mobility, speed and communication. However the current systems are limited in terms of mobility, flexibility and privacy issues. More over the existing solution does not provide any seamless integration of various healthcare providers to provide an effective and efficient team-based continuous care services for patients with chronic illness who prefer to stay in a community based setting. In this paper, we present a generic mobile health monitoring system based on 3G mobile network and software-agent which involves a set of intelligent agents. These software agents will work as human agents in collaborating among different health care professionals for offering team-based medical services. The proposed system can be implemented in a number of situations in a mobile environment.