A methodology for the development of software agent based interoperable telemedicine systems: a tele-electrocardiography perspective.
Telemedicine involves the integration of information, human-machine, and healthcare technologies. Because different modalities of patient care require applications running on heterogeneous computing environment, software interoperability is a major issue in telemedicine. Software agent technology provides a range of promising techniques to solve this problem. This article discusses the development of a methodology for the design of interoperable telemedicine systems (illustrated with a tele-electrocardiography application). Software interoperability between different applications can be modeled at different levels of abstraction such as physical interoperability, data-type interoperability, specification-level interoperability, and semantic interoperability. Software agents address the issue of software interoperability at semantic level. A popular object-oriented software development methodology - unified modeling language (UML) - has been used for this development. This research has demonstrated the feasibility of the development of agent-based interoperable telemedicine systems. More research is needed before widespread deployment of such systems can take place.
Ganguly
P
P
School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia.p.ganguly@unsw.edu.au
Ray
P
P
D003199:Computer Systems; D004562:Electrocardiography / Q000295:instrumentation*; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D006801:Humans; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation; D012985:Software Design; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000295:instrumentation*; D013686:Telemetry / Q000295:instrumentation*