A health care monitoring system that uses ontology agents

The healthcare domain is mission critical and vast research efforts keep being funded in order to improve life quality of people. Health management consists of specific cooperation intensive activities, while medical knowledge and systems are spatially and functionally distributed. Also, medical data flows are inefficient for dynamic data delivery to stakeholders while the manifold of medical care derives from their diversity and autonomy. In such an environment we propose the implementation of vhMentor based on a solid ontological schema. The aim of the proposed system is to suggest an agent-based solution to overcome the automation deficiencies of medical data monitoring. Towards this objective we study the applicability and usefulness of the mobile agent technology in the healthcare domain. Furthermore, we implemented the encapsulation of remote sensing and medical devices signals in an ontology-supported healthcare information system. The resulting system encourages the future implementation of next generation services (e.g. decision making and reasoning) through autonomous - intelligent agents and reasoning engines.