The term “Hybrid Society” (HS) denotes, in this project, a complex ecosystem in which humans and autonomous intelligent entities coexist. Initial attempts exist for definition of concepts similar to HS (e.g., the “Metaversum” by Facebook). An international workshop on “Methods for Self-Organizing Distributed Systems” was held in Germany in 2015. Its outcome is reported in [H.Hamann,Y.Khaluf,J.Botev,M.Divband Soorati,E.Ferrante,O.Kosak,J.-M.Montanier, S.Mostaghim, R.Redpath, J.Timmis, F.Veenstra, M.Wahby, A.Zamuda:Hybrid Societies: Challenges and Perspectives in the Design of Collective Behavior in Self-organizing Systems. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3: 14 (2016)], from which we quote what we found to be the most significant statements: “hybrid societies are made of different components instead of having a homogeneous identity. We call them “societies” because the components possess individual agency and interact persistently. Such societies can be comprised both natural and artificial agents or different types of artificial agents only”. They conclude to have identified “three primary challenges of designing hybrid societies:
formalization, system design, and interdisciplinarity”. For the European Union (http://ec.europa.eu/health/ehealth/policy/index_en.htm), “Digital health and care [eHealth] refers to tools and services that use information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve prevention, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring and management of health-related issues and to monitor and manage lifestyle-habits that impact health. [This] can improve access to care and the quality of that care, as well as increase the overall efficiency of the health sector.” The term “eHealth” refers to the synergic adoption of ICT in general, and Artificial Intelligence in particular, to healthcare. The provision of quality healthcare in a cost-effective way is in fact a critical issue in all countries, also due to the ageing population, the reappearance of diseases that were considered extinct, and the development of challenging new issues, such as the Ebola and Covid-19 pandemics. Intelligent healthcare systems can be of help to cope with such issues in the interest of patients, doctors, personnel and all other parties involved, including Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca
MUR – BANDO 2022 patients’ families. Hardware devices are gradually becoming cost-affordable, including wearable devices for detecting patients’ data (such as, e.g, blood pressure, heart beating, fever, etc). Robotic applications are becoming increasingly effective, as many inexpensive robotic hardware solutions are available on the market. Software applications managing these devices can be interfaced to several medical information systems (e.g., patient databases, medical archives). Health support systems have therefore been developed. In general, they are based on scalable architectures covering a wide spectrum of roles and models. Artificial Intelligence, and in particular Agents and Mult-Agent Systems (MAS) architectures, are a natural choice to implement such systems [Agents and Multi-Agent Systems for Health Care, Springer, LNCS 10685, 2017], and in fact they have been profitably employed (cf., e.g., the review [Iqbal, S., Altaf, W., Aslam, M. et al. (2016) Application of intelligent agents in health-care: review. Artif. Intell. Rev. 46, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-016-9457-y], with useful references therein). The comprehensive intelligent healthcare system that we propose is confronted, in practice, with a state of the art that includes big proprietary systems, like IBM Watson, which implemented the Health Platform (that was a failure, in fact it has been closed because it turned out to be dangerously unreliable), and a proliferation of “apps” that offer various kinds of services to patients. However, quoting from a recent review [Jokinen A., Stolt M., and Suhonen R., Ethical Issues Related to e Health: an Integrative Review, J. on Nursing Ethics, Sept. 2015] (cf. also the references therein), “There is a lack of studies about the ethics of eHealth services from the service users’ perspective.” And, from [Caiani E., Ethics of digital health tools, e-Journ. of Cardiology Practice, Vol. 18, N. 27, 2020], we also quote: “New technologies promise to improve healthcare by … new approaches to cope with the limitations of current practice. However, … ethical implications … [must be] discussed… The importance of pre-evaluating ethical implications before implementation of new digital solutions into clinical practice [must be] highlighted…”. In our view, what is needed by doctors, patients, caregivers, and all other parties involved, is not proprietary closed systems, but rather interpretable systems, where all kinds of users perceive to have sufficient guarantees that such systems act always and exclusively for the good of the patients, and that their decisions do not conflict with the patients’ moral principles.