Prospects for Expanding Telehealth: Multi-Agent Autonomic Architectures

The worldwide trend of rapidly rising health care costs and growing demands for access to quality health services at lower costs is a driving force for development and adoption of telehealth systems and technologies. However, the complexity of development, deployment, integration, and management of next-generation telehealth systems needs to be addressed by a new computing paradigm that will not rely on human intervention and administration to manage the system complexity. Hence, our research focuses on autonomic computing - a new computing paradigm that has been inspired by the human body's self-regulatory nervous system. Autonomic computing systems are envisioned to be self-aware and able to self-manage. In this research project, we explore multi-agent approach for development of autonomic architectures for telehealth systems. In this paper, we present multi-agent autonomic system architecture for telemonitoring that involves remotely monitoring health conditions of patients in post- surgery and patients with chronic diseases or life- threatening health problems requiring continuous monitoring. We discuss our latest research results and plans for further research in this area.