Privacy-based multiagent brokering architecture for ubiquitous healthcare systems

Ubiquitous healthcare is an emerging technology that promises increases in efficiency, accuracy and availability of medical treatment; however it also introduces the potential for serious abuses including major privacy violations. Brokering is a capability-based coordination approach for ubiquitous healthcare systems (UHS). A major challenge of brokering in open environments is to support privacy. Within the context of brokering, the authors model privacy in terms of the entities' ability to hide or reveal information related to its identities, requests, and/or capabilities. This work presents a privacy-based multi-agent 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. To put the formulation in practice, a prototype of the proposed architecture has been implemented to support information-gathering capabilities in healthcare environments using FIPA-complaint platform (JADE).