Privacy based information brokering for cooperative distributed e-health systems

Healthcare services and systems become very complex and encompass a vast number of entities (software systems, doctors, patients, etc.) that are characterized by shared, distributed and heterogeneous information sources with varieties of clinical and medical settings. A major challenge of brokering in open environments is to support privacy. Within the context of brokering, we model privacy in terms of the entities' ability to hide or reveal information related to its identities, requests, and/or capabilities. In this work we present a privacy-based multi-agent information brokering architecture that supports different privacy degrees. Unlike traditional approaches, the brokering is viewed as a set of services in which the brokering role is further classified into several sub-roles each with a specific architecture and interaction protocol that is appropriate to support a required privacy degree. The proposed architecture has been implemented using coordinated intelligent, rational agent (CIR-agent) model for cooperative distributed information ehealth prototype using (JADE), FIPA-complaint platform.