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 he althcare technologies. Because different modalities of patient care require applications running on heterogeneous computing environment, software inte roperability is a major issue in telemedicine. Software agent technology pr ovides 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 applicati on). Software interoperability between different applications can be modele d at different levels of abstraction such as physical interoperability, dat a-type interoperability, specification-level interoperability, and semantic interoperability. Software agents address the issue of software interopera bility at semantic level. A popular object-oriented software development me thodology-unified modeling language (UML)-has been used for this developmen t. This research has demonstrated the feasibility of the development of age nt-based interoperable telemedicine systems. More research is needed before widespread deployment of such systems can take place.