Smart Agent-Based Hospital Search, Appointment, and Medical Diagnosis

Various areas of the healthcare industry have seen some progress in the use of ICT to aid in the treatment of patients including some amount of automation in the key areas. The authors infer that some pitfalls exist in the healthcare administration. To obviate these, the use of Agent technology as a practical solution to solve some hospital related issues with particular emphasis on hospital search and appointment allocation has been researched. The authors explore the use of agent technology to assist patients seeking treatment for their ailment at a hospital chosen, and priority is provided based on treatment. The patients have been given the facility to select an appropriate hospital based on their preferred selection criterion, achieved through the use of their mobile phone by exactly replicating the job of a human being agent. The authors study first how smart agents can be used to search for hospitals based on user selection criteria in combination with the Google Map facility and fairly diagnose their medical ailments using Layman language. The Agent proposed here, also facilitates verification of doctor's license before the appointment with him is confirmed. Lastly, the proposed system provides the rating and the popularity factors of the selected hospital in respect of ailment based and on number of persons visited. The system also alerts the hospital for poor rating/popularity enabling working towards improvement. The Smart agents proposed for action act autonomously and have the ability to intelligently use the available knowledgebase and user parameters to make appropriate decisions on behalf of the user. The system uses ANDROID 2.2, JADE-LEAP and the Google API to provide a robust, user friendly solution.