Applications of Mobile Agents in Healthcare Domain: A Literature Survey

Mobile agent technology is emanating as a new paradigm in the area of distributed and mobile computing, and has been engaged in many areas from network management tasks to information management. It makes considerably simpler to model, implement, and maintain distributed systems, including sensor networks and cloud computing. It provides an infrastructure not only for executing autonomous agents but also migrating them between different computers. In the recent years, mobile agent paradigm has emerged as a viable approach for the evolution of autonomic systems in the healthcare domain. This paper reviews the applicability and usefulness of mobile agents in a wide variety of healthcare applications such as medical data management, medical information retrieval, health data integration, decision-making support, telemedicine, securing medical information and coordination of distinct medical activities.