Authors:
Florian Nafz
;
Frank Ortmeier
;
Hella Seebach
and
Wolfgang Reif
Affiliation:
Lehrstuhl für Softwaretechnik und Programmiersprachen, Unversität Augsburg, Germany
Keyword(s):
Organic Computing, multi-agent systems, health-care applications, security.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cloud Computing
;
Collaboration and e-Services
;
Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation
;
Data Engineering
;
Decision Support Systems
;
e-Business
;
e-Health
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Health Information Systems
;
Hospital Management Systems
;
Integration/Interoperability
;
Interoperability
;
Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Online Medical Applications
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Platforms and Applications
;
Sensor Networks
;
Simulation and Modeling
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Software and Architectures
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Todays health care institutions will undergo major changes in the next two decades. The reason for this is the change of ageing structure in many industrialized countries. In Germany statistics indicate that the costs for health care systems will at least double per person while the number of contributing, working citizens will significantly lower. At the same time average life expectation will rise above 80 years. To cope up with this development adaptations to organization and process of health care are necessary. Typically tasks in stationary health care can be divided in two groups: task which incorporate direct interaction with the patient (care tasks) and tasks which focus on logistics and organization (background tasks). In health care it is not desirable and feasible to reduce efforts in care tasks. So costs and efforts must be reduced within the second group of tasks. This is possible if new paradigms – both in organization and underlying software architecture – are applied.
One such paradigm is organic computing. Organic computing aims at systems, which are self-organizing, self-adapting to new challenges and self-optimize during runtime. Such systems can take away a lot of organizatorial work form the staff and thus allow for more and better care without rising budgets. The paper outlines the idea of organic computing as well as opportunities and challenges for applying it in the health care context.
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