Abstract

The use of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in health-care domains is increasing. Such Agent-mediated Medical Systems are designed to manage complex tasks and have the potential to adapt gracefully to unexpected events. However, in that kind of systems the issues of privacy and security (in the access to patient records), safety and soundness (of the individual agent behaviours and the multiagent system as a whole) and trust (among heterogeneous agents and among users and agents) are particularly sensitive. An additional issue is that health care systems are highly regulated by regional, national and European regulations and policies. Therefore several normative contexts (European, national, regional) should be taken into account while designing agent-mediated health care systems. In this paper the less explored normative problem of the application of agents in Health Care will be presented. The impact on both the individual agents and the agent platforms will be discussed. On the individual agent side, Normative Agents (agents whose behaviour is guided by collections of norms) will be presented. On the agent platforms side, the concept of Electronic Institutions (as normative environments to increase trust and ensure proper agent behaviour) will be presented, along with some methodological considerations, the impact on implementation and some of the technologies needed to be developed in the future. 1

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